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COPYRIGHT DEPOSITS 



WORKS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



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they lend him, everywhere, their ears, and thousands bless his 
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PARNASSUS : A volume of Choice Poems, selected from 
the whole range of English Literature, edited by Ralph 
Waldo Emerson. With a Prefatory Essay. Crown 
8vo. Nearly 600 pages. $4.00. 



JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., 

Publishers, Boston. 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 



NEW AND REVISED EDITION. 



M5^*#6£4^ 




BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
1876. 



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Copyright, 1856 and 1876, 

By RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

U. COPY 

WPPLIEO FROM 

COPYRIGHT FILES 

JANUARY, mi. 



University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. First Visit to England .... 7 

II. Voyage to England .... 23 

III. Land . .30 

IV. Race 37 

V. Ability .GO 

VI. Manners . 81 

VII. Truth 91 

VIII. Character 99 

IX. Cockayne HI 

X. Wealth 118 

XI. Aristocracy 132 

XII. Universities 152 

XIII. Religion 163 

XIV. Literature . . . . . . 176 



VI CONTENTS. 

XV. The "Times" 197 

XVI. Stonehenge 206 

XVII. Personal 220 

XVIII. Result 225 

XIX. Speech at Manchester .... 232 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 
CHAPTER I. 

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 

I HAVE been twice in England. In 1833, on mj 
return from a short tour in Sicily, Italy, and France, I 
crossed from Boulogne, and landed in London at the 
Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning; there 
were few people in the streets ; and I remember the 
l)leasure of that first walk on English ground, with my 
companion, an American artist, from the Tower up 
through Clieapside and the Strand, to a house in Russell 
Square, whither we had been recommended to good 
chambers. Eor the first time for many months we were 
forced to check the saucy habit of travellers' criticism, 
as we could no longer speak aloud in the streets without 
being understood. The shop-signs spoke our language ; 
our country names were on the door-plates ; and the 
public and private buildings wore a more native and 
wonted front. 

Like most young men at that time, I was much in- 
debted to the men of Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh 
Review, — to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott, 



8 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Playfair, and De Quince.y ; and my narrow and desul- 
tory reading liad inspired the wisli io see the faces of 
three or four writers, — Coleridge, "Wordsworth, Lan- 
der, De Quincey, and the latest and strongest contrib- 
utor to the critical journals, Carlyle ; and I suppose if 
1 had sifted the reasons that led me to Europe, when I 
was ill and was advised to travel, it was mainly the 
attraction of these persons. If Goethe had been still 
living, I might have wandered mto Germany also. Be- 
sides those 1 have named (for Scott was dead), there was 
not in Britain the man living whom I cared to behold, 
unless it were the Duke of Wellington, whom I after- 
wards saw at Westminster Abbej"", at the funeral of 
"Wilberforce. The young scholar fancies it happiness 
enough to live with people who can give an inside to 
the world ; without reflecting that they are prisoners, 
too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves 
to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost 
destructive of the best social power, as they do not leave 
that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion 
on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure 
comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother- 
wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land 
to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, how- 
ever, found writers superior to their books, and I cling 
to my first belief, that a strong head will dispose fast 
enough of these impediments, and give one the satisfac- 
tion of reality, the sense of having been met, and a 
larger horizon. 

On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833, I 
find nothing to publish in my memoranda of visits to 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 9 

places. But I liave copied the few notes I made of 
visits to persons, as they respect parties quite too good 
and too transparent to the whole world to make it need- 
ful to affect any prudery of suppression about a few 
hints of those bright personalities. 

At Florence, chief among artists, I found Horatio 
Greenough, the American sculptor. His face was so 
handsome, and his person so well formed, that he might 
be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of his Medora, 
and the figure of a colossal Achilles in clay, were ideal- 
izations of his own. Greenough was a superior man, 
ardent and eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation 
and magnanimity. He believed that the Greeks had 
wrought in schools or fraternities, — the geuius of the 
master imparting his design to his friends, and inflaming 
them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new 
hand, with equal heat, continued the work ; and so by 
relays, until it was finished in every part with equal fire. 
This was necessary in so refractory a material as stone ; 
and he thought art would never prosper until we left our 
shy jealous ways, and worked in society as they. All his 
thoughts breathed the same generosity. He was an ac- 
curate and a deep man. He was a votary of the Greeks, 
and impatient of Gothic art. His paper on Architecture, 
published in 1843, announced in advance the leading 
thoughts of Mr. lluskin on the moralUi/ in architecture, 
notwithstanding the antagonism in their views of the 
history of art. I have a private letter from him, — later, 
but respecting the same period, — in which he roughly 
sketches his own theory. " Here is my theory of struc- 
ture : A scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to 
1 * 



10 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

functions and to site ; an emphasis of features propor- 
tioned to their gradated importance in function; color 
and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by 
strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason for each 
decision ; the entire and innnediate banishment of all 
makeshift and make-believe." 

Greenougli brought me, through a common friend, an 
invitation from Mr, Landor, who lived at San Domenica 
di Fiesole. On the 15th May 1 dined with Mr. Landor. 
I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pic- 
tures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding 
a beautiful landscape. 1 had inferred from his books, or 
magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achil- 
lean wrath, — an untamable petulance. I do not know 
whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on 
this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and 
he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He praised 
the beautiful cyclamen which grows all about Florence ; 
he admired Washington ; talked of Wordsworth, Byron, 
Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he is 
decided in his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well con- 
tent to impress, if possible, his English whim upon the 
immutable past. No great man ever had a great son, if 
Philip and Alexander be not an exception ; and Philip he 
calls the greater man. In art, he loves the Greeks, and 
in sculpture, them only. He prefers the Venus to every- 
thing else, and, after that, the head of Alexander, in the 
gallery here. He prefers John of Bologna to Michel 
Angelo ; in painthig, llaflFaelle ; and shares the growing 
taste for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek 
histories he thought the only good ; and after them. Vol- 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 11 

talre's. I could not make lilm praise Mackiutosl), nor 
my more recent friends ; Montaigne very cordially, — 
and Charron also, which seemed undiscriminating. He 
thought Degerando indebted to " Lucas on Happiness " 
and "Lucas on Holiness"! He pestered me with 
Southey ; but who is Southey ? 

He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I 
did not fail to go, and this time with Greenough. He 
entertained us at once with reciting half a dozen hexam- 
eter lines of Julius Caesar's ! — from Donatus, he said. 
He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary, 
and undervalued Burke, and undervalued Socrates ; des- 
ignated as three of the greatest of men, Washington, 
Phocion, and Timoleon ; much as our pomologists, in 
their lists, select the three or the six best pears " for a 
small orchard " ; and did not even omit to remark the 
similar termination of their names. "A great man," he 
said, " should make great sacrifices, and kill his hundred 
oxen, without knowing whether they would be consumed 
by gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat them." 
I had visited Professor Amici, who had shown me his 
microscopes, magnifying (it was said) two thousand diam- 
eters ; and I spoke of the uses to which they were applied. 
Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, 
said, "the sublime was in a grain of dust." I suppose I 
teased him about recent writers, but he professed never 
to have heard of Herschel, not even by name. One room 
was full of pictures, which he likes to show, especially 
one piece, standing before which, he said "he would give 
fifty guineas to the man that would swear it was a l)o- 
menichiuo." I was more curious to see his library, but 



12 ENGLISH THAITS. 

Mr. H , one of the guests, told me that Mr. Laudor 

gives away his books, and has never more than a dozen 
at a time in his house. 

Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which 
the English delight to indulge, as if to signalize their 
commanding freedom. He has a wonderful brain, des- 
potic, violent, and inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by 
what chance converted to letters, in which there is not a 
style nor a tint not known to him, yet with an English 
appetite for action and heroes. The thing done avails, 
^ud not what is said about it. An original sentence, 
a step forward, is worth more than all the censures. 
Landor is strangely undervalued in England; usually ig- 
nored; and sometimes savagely attacked in the Reviews. 
The criticism may be right or wrong, and is quickly 
» forgotten ; but year after year the scholar must still 
go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant senten- 
ces, — for wisdom, wit, and indignation that are unfor- 
getable. 

From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, 
and wrote a note to Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to 
pay my respects to him. It was near noon. Mr. Cole- 
ridge sent a verbal message, that he was in bed, but if 
1 would call after one o'clock, he would see me. I re- 
turned at one, and he appeared, a short, thick old man, 
with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion, leaning 
on his cane. He took snuff freely, which presently soiled 
his cravat and neat black suit. He asked whether I knew 
Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and doings when 
he knew him in Home ; what a master of the Titianesque 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 13 

be was, etc., etc. He spoke of Dr. Chauning. It was 
an unspeakable misfortune that he should have turned 
out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst into a decla- 
mation on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism, — its 
high unreasonableness ; and taking up Bishop Water- 
land's book, which lay on the table, he read with vehe- 
mence two or three pages written by himself in the 
fly-leaves, — passages, too, which, I believe, are printed 
in the " Aids to Reflection." When he stopped to take 
breath, I interposed, that, " whilst I highly valued all his 
explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born 
and bred a Unitarian." " Yes," he said, " I supposed 
so " ; and continued as before. ' It was a wonder, that 
after so many ages of unquestioning acquiescence in the 
doctrine of St. Paul, — the doctrine of the Trinity, which 
was also, according to Philo Judaeus, the doctruie of the 
Jews before Christ, — this handful of Priestleians should 
take on themselves to deny it, etc., etc. He was very 
sorry that Dr. Channiug, — a man to whom he looked 
up, — no, to say that he looked tip to him would be to 
speak falsely ; but a man whom he looked at with so 
much interest, — should embrace such views. When he 
saw Dr. Channing, he had hinted to him that he was 
afraid he loved Christianity for what was lovely and excel- 
lent, — he loved the good in it, and not the true ; and I 
tell you, sir, that I have known ten persons who loved 
the good, for one person who loved the true ; but it is a 
far greater virtue to love the true for itself alone, than to 
love the good for itself alone. He (Coleridge) knew all 
about Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had once 
been a Unitarian, and knew what quackery it was. He 



14 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

liad been called "the rising star of Uiiitarianism." ' lie 
went oil defining, or rather refining -. ' The Trinitarian 
doctrine was realism ; the idea of God was not essential, 
but super-essential ' ; talked of trinism and tetrakism, and 
much more, of which I only caught this : ' that the will 
was that by which a person is a person ; because, if one 
should push me in the street, and so I should force the 
man next me into the kennel, I should at once exclaim, 
" I did not do it, sir," meaning it was not my will.' And 
this also : ' that if you should insist on your faith here in 
England, and I on mine, mine would be the hotter side of 
the fagot.' 

I took advantage of a pause to say, that he had many 
readers of all religious opinions in America, and I pro- 
ceeded to inquire if the "extract" from the Indepen- 
dent's pamphlet, in the third volume of the Friend, Avere 
a veritable quotation. He replied that it was really taken 
from a pamphlet in his possession, entitled " A Protest 
of one of the Independents," or something to that effect. 
I told him how excellent I thought it, and how much I 
wished to see the entire work. "Yes," he said, "the 
man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the knowledge that 
God was a god of order. Yet the passage would no 
doubt strike you more in the quotation than in the origi- 
nal, for I have filtered it." 

When I rose to go, he said, " I do not know whether 
you care about poetry, but I will repeat some verses I 
lately made on my baptismal anniversary"; and he re- 
cited with strong emphasis, standing, ten or twelve lines, 
beginning, — 

" Born unto God in Christ — " 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 15 

lie inquired where I liad been travelling ; and on learn- 
ing that I had been in Malta and Sicily, he compared one 
island with the other, ' repeating what he had said to the 
Bishop of London when he returned from that country, 
that Sicily w^as an excellent school of political economy ; 
for, in any town there, it only needed to ask what the 
government enacted, and reverse that to know what 
ought to be done ; it was the most felicitously opposite 
legislation to anything good and wise. There were only 
three things which the government had brought into 
that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox, and famine; 
whereas, in Malta, the force of law and mind was seen, 
in making that barren rock of semi-Saracen inhabitants 
the seat of population and plenty.' Going out, he 
showed me in the next apartment a picture of Allston's, 
and told me ' that Montague, a picture-dealer, once came 
to see him, and, glancing towards tliis, said, " Well, you 
have got a picture ! " thinking it the work of an old mas- 
ter ; afterwards, Montague, still talking with his back to 
the canvas, put u*p his hand and touched it, and exclaimed, 
" By Heaven ! this picture is not ten years old " : — so 
delicate and skilful was that man's touch.' 

I was in his company for about an hour, but find it 
impossible to recall the largest part of his discourse, 
which was often like so many printed paragraphs in his 
book, — perhaps the same, — so readily did he fall into 
certain commonplaces. As I might have fores;en, the 
visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation, of no use 
beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was old and 
preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and 
think with him. 



16 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Prom Edinburgli I went to the Highlands. On my 
return, I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being 
intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from 
Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in 
Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles dis- 
tant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private 
carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate 
heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his 
mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an 
author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as 
absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that 
hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in 
London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, 
self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers of 
conversation in easy command ; clinging to his northern 
accent with evident relish ; full of lively anecdote, and 
with a streaming humor, which floated everything he 
looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the familiar 
objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance 
with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to 
learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. 
Few were the objects and lonely the man, " not a person 
to speak to within sixteen miles except the minister of 
Dunscore " ; so that books inevitably made his topics. 

He had names of his own for all the matters familiar 
to his discourse. "Blackwood's" was the "sand maga- 
zine"; "Fraser's" nearer approach to possibility of life 
was the " mud magazine " ; a piece of road near by that 
marked some failed enterprise was the " grave of the last 
sixpence." When too much praise of any genius annoyed 
him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 17 

Ills pig. He liud spent much time and contrivance in 
confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but 
pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to 
let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he 
still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the 
planet, and he liked Nero's death, " Qiialis artifex pereo!" 
better than most history. He worships a man that will 
manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired 
and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle 
was mere rebellion, and that he feared was the American 
principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, 
that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had 
read in Stewart's book, that when he inquired in a New 
York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the 
street and had found Mungo in his own house dining on 
roast turkey. 

We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he 
disparaged Socrates ; and, when pressed, persisted in 
making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid 
bridge from the old world to the new. His own read- 
ing had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of 
lus first books after Robinson Crusoe, and Robertson's 
America an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had 
discovered to him that he was not a dunce ; and it was 
now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice 
of a man who told him he would find in that language 
what he wanted. 

He took despairing or satirical views of literature at 
this moment ; recounted the incredible sums paid in one 
year by the great booksellers for pufiing. Hence it 
comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are 

B 



18 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

bought, and the booksellers are on tlie eve of bank- 
ruptcy. 

He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded 
country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that 
])ublic persons should perform. ' Government should 
direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wan- 
dering over these moors. My dame makes it a rule to 
give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his 
wants to the next house. But here are thousands of 
acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid 
these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. Thev burned 
the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people 
to attend to them.' 

We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at 
Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Words- 
worth's country. There we sat down, and talked of the 
immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle's fault that 
we talked on that topic, for he had the natural disinclina- 
tion of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, 
and did not like to place himself where no step can be 
taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of 
the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how 
every event affects all the future. ' Christ died on the 
tree : that built Dunscore kirk yonder : that brought you 
and me together. Time has only a relative existence.' 

He was already turning his eyes towards London with 
a scholar's appreciation. London is the heart of the 
world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human 
beings. He liked the liuge machine. Each keeps its 
own round. The baker's boy brings muffins to the 
window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the 



FITIST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 19 

Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But 
it turned out good men. He named certain individuals, 
especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he 
knew, whom London had well served. 

On the 28th August, I went to Rydal Mount, to pay 
my respects to Mr. Wordsworth. His daughters called 
in their father, a plain, elderly, white-haired man, not 
prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles. He sat 
down, and talked with great simplicity. He had just re- 
turned from a journey. His health was good, but he had 
broken a tooth by a fall, when walking with two lawyers, 
and had said, that he was glad it did not happen forty 
years ago ; whereupon they had praised his philosophy. 

He had much to say of America, the more that it gave 
occasion for his favorite topic, — that society is being en- 
lightened by a superficial tuition, out of all proportion to 
its being restrained by moral culture. Schools do no 
good. Tuition is not education. He thinks more of the 
education of circumstances than of tuition. 'T is not a 
question whether there are offences of which the law takes 
cognizance, but whether there are offences of which the 
law does not take cognizance. Sin is what he fears, and 
how society is to escape without gravest mischiefs from 
this source — ? He has even said, what seemed a para- 
dox, that they needed a civil war in America, to teach the 
necessity of knitting the social ties stronger. ' There 
may be,' he said, ' in America some vulgarity in man- 
ner, but that 's not important. That comes of tlie pio- 
neer state of things. ♦> But I fear they are too much given 
to the making of money ; and secondly, to politics ; that 



20 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

they make political distinction tlie end, and not the 
means. ! And I fear they lack a class of men of leisure, — 
ill short, of gentlemen, — to give a tone of honor to the 
community. I am told that things are boasted of in tlie 
second class of society there, which, in England, — God 
knows, are done in England every day, — but would 
never be spoken of. In America I wish to know not how 
many churches or schools, but what newspapers ? My 
friend. Colonel Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was 
a year in America, assures me that the newspapers are 
atrocious, and accuse members of Congress of stealing 
spoons ! ' He was against taking off the tax on news- 
papers in England, which the reformers represent as a 
lax upon knowledge, for this reason, that they would be 
inundated with base prints. He said, he talked on politi- 
cal aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good 
Americans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, etc.j 
etc., and never to call into action the physical strength of 
the people,'^ as had just now been done in England in the 
Reform Bill, — a thing prophesied by Delolme. He 
alluded once or twice to his conversation with Dr. Chan- 
ning, who had recently visited him (laying his hand on a 
particular chair in which the Doctor had sat). 
. The conversation turned on books. Lucretius he es- 
teems a. far higher poet than Virgil: not in his system, 
which is nothing, but in his power of illustration. Faith 
is necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the 
foreknowledge of God with human evil. Of Cousin 
(whose lectures we had all been reading in Boston) he 
knew only the name. 

I inquired if he had read Carlyle's critical articles and 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 21 

translations. He said lie tliouglit him sometimes insane. 
He proceeded to abuse Goethe's Wilhelm Meister heart- 
ily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It was 
like the crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone 
further than the first part ; so disgusted was he that he 
threw the book across the room. I deprecated this 
wrath, and said what I could for the better parts of the 
book ; and he courteously promised to look at it again. 
Carlyle, he said, wrote most obscurely. He was clever 
and deep, but he defied the sympathies of ever^^body. 
Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more clearly, though he had 
always wished Coleridge would write more to be under- 
stood. He led me out into his garden, and showed me 
the gravel- walk in which thousands of his lines were 
composed. His eyes are much inflamed. This is no 
loss, except for reading, because he never writes prose, 
and of poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his 
head before writing them. He had just returned from a 
visit to Staffa, and within three days had made three 
sonnets on Eingal's Cave, and was composing a fourth, 
when he was called in to see me. He said, " If you are 
interested in my verses, perhaps you will like to hear 
these lines." I gladly assented ; and he recollected him- 
self for a few moments, and then stood forth and re- 
peated, one after the other, the three entire sonnets with 
great animation. I fancied the second and third more 
beautiful than his poems are wont to be. The third is 
addressed to the flowers, which, he said, especially the 
ox-eye daisy, are very abundant on the top of the rock. 
Tlie second alludes to the name of the cave, which is 
" Cave of Music " : the first to the circumstance of its 



22 ENGLISH TllAITS. 

being visited by the promiscuous company of the steam- 
boat. 

This recitation was so unlooked lor and surprising, — 
lie, the old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to 
me in a garden-walk, like a school-boy declaiming, — 
that I at first was near to laugh ; but recollecting my- 
self, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and he was 
chanting poems to me, I saw that he was right and I was 
wrong, and gladly gave myself up to hear. I told him 
how much the few printed extracts had quickened the 
desire to possess his unpublished poems. He replied, he 
never was in haste to publish; partly, because he cor- 
rected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously 
received after printing; but what he had written would 
be printed, whether he lived or died. I said, " Tintern 
Abbey " appeared to be the favorite poem with the pub- 
lic, but more contemplative readers preferred the first 
books of the " Excursion," and the Sonnets. He said, 
"Yes, they are belter." He preferred such of his poems 
as touched the affections, to any others ; for whatever is 
didactic — what theories of society, and so on — might 
perish quickly ; but w^hatever combined a truth with an 
affection was kxt^/uo es aei, good to-day and good forever. 
He cited the sonnet " On the feelings of a high-minded 
Spaniard," which he preferred to any other (I so under- 
stood him), and the "Two Voices"; and quoted, with 
evident pleasure, the verses addressed " To the Skylark."- 
In this connection, he said of the Newtonian theory, that 
it might yet be superseded and forgotten ; and Dalton's 
atomic theory. 

When I prepared to depart, he said he wished to show 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 23 

me wlmt a common person in England conld do, and lie 
led me into the enclosure of his clerk, a young man, to 
whom he had given this slip of ground, which was laid 
out, or its natural capabilities shown, with much taste. 
He then said he would show me a better way towards 
the inn ; and he walked a good part of a mile, talking, 
and ever and anon stopping short to impress the word or 
the verse, and finally parted from me with great kindness, 
and returned across the fields. 

Wordsworth honored himself by liis simple adherence 
to truth, and w^as very willing not to shine ; but he sur- 
prised by the hard limits of his thought. To judge from 
a single conversation, he made the impression of a nar- 
row and very English mind ; of one who paid for his 
rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off 
his own beat, his opinions were of no value. It is not 
very rare to find persons loving sympathy and ease, who 
expiate their departure from the common in one direc- 
tion, by their conformity in every other. 



CHAPTER II. 

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 

The occasion of my second visit to England was an 
invitation from some Mechanics' Institutes in Lancashire 
and Yorkshire, which separately are organized much in 
the same w'ay as our New England Lyceums, but, in 
1847, had been linked into a "Union," which embraced 
twenty or thirty towns and cities, and presently extended 



24 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

into 1]ie middle counties, find nortliward into Scotland. 
1 Avas invited, on liberal Irnns, to read a series of lec- 
tures in them all. The request was urged with every 
kiiid suggestion, and every assurance of aid and comfort, 
by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the sequel, 
amply redeemed their word. The remuneration was 
equivalent to the fees at that time paid in this country 
for the like services. At all events, it was sufficient to 
cover any travelling expenses, and the proposal offered 
an excellent opportunity of seeing the interior of England 
and Scotland, by means of a home, and a committee of 
intelligent friends, awaiting me in every town. 

I did not go very willingly. I am not a good travel- 
ler, nor have I found that long journeys yield a fair 
share of reasonable hours. But the invitation was re- 
peated and pressed at a moment of more leisure, and 
when I was a little spent by some unusual studies. I 
wanted a change and a tonic, and England was proposed 
to me. Besides, there were, at least, the dread attrac- 
tion and salutary influences of the sea. So I took my 
})erth in the packet-ship Washington Irving, and sailed 
from Boston on Tuesday, 5th October, 1847. 

On Friday, at noon, we had only made one hundred 
and thirty-four miles. A nimble Indian would have 
swum as far; but the captain affirmed that the ship 
would show us in time all her paces, and we crept along 
through the floating drift of boards, logs, and chips, 
which the rivers of Maine and New Brunswick pour into 
the sea after a freshet. 

At last, on Sunday niglit, after doing one day's work i:i 
four, the storm came, the winds blew, and wc flew bcrcro 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 25 

a northwester, which strained every rope and sail. The 
good ship darts through the water all day, all niglit, hke 
a fish, quivering with speed, gliding through liquid 
leagues, sliding from horizon to horizon. She has passed 
Cape Sable ; she has reached the Banks ; the land-birds 
are left; gulls, haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive, and 
liover around ; no fishermen; she has passed the Banks ; 
left five sail behind her, far on the edge of the west at 
sundown, which were far east of us at morn, — though 
they say at sea a stern chase is a long race, — and still 
we fly for our lives. The shortest sea-line from Boston 
to Liverpool is 2,850 miles. This a steamer keeps, and 
saves 150 miles. A sailing ship can never go in a shorter 
line than 3,000, and usually it is much longer. Our good 
master keeps his kites up to the last moment, studding- 
sails alow and aloft, and, by incessant straight steering, 
never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the law of 
the ship, — watch on watch, for advantage and for life. 
Since the ship was built, it seems, the master never slept 
but in his day-clothes whilst on board. " There are 
many advantages," says Saadi, "in sea-voyaging, but 
security is not one of them." Yet in hurrying over these 
abysses, whatever dangers we are running into, we are 
certahily running out of the risks of hundreds of miles 
every day, which have their own chances of squall, col- 
lision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold, and thunder. Hour for 
hour, the risk on a steamboat is greater ; but the speed 
is safety, or twelve days of danger, instead of twenty- 
four. 

Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed per- 
haps, with all her freight^ 1,500 tons. The mainmast, 
2 



26 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

from tlie deck to the top-button, measured 115 feet; the 
length of the deck, from stem to stern, 155. It is im- 
possible not to personify a ship ; everybody does in every- 
thing they say : — she behaves well; she minds her rud- 
der ; she swims like a duck ; she runs her nose into the 
water; she looks into a port. Tlien that wonderful esprit 
du corps, by which we adopt into our self-love every- 
thing we touch, makes us all champions of her sailing- 
qualities. 

The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one week 
she has made 1,467 miles, and now, at night, seems to 
hear the steamer behind her, which left Boston to-day at 
two, has mended her speed, and is flying before the gray 
south-wind eleven and a half knots the hour. The sea- 
fire shines in her wake, and far around wherever a wave 
breaks. I read the hour, 9h. 45', on my watch by this 
light. Near the equator, you can read small print by 
it ; and the mate describes the phospiioric insects, when 
taken up in a pail, as shaped like a Carolina potato. 

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for toma- 
toes and olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise, 
and odor are not to be dispensed with. The floor of 
your room is sloped at an angle of twenty or thirty 
degrees, and I waked every morning with the belief tliat 
some one was tipping up my berth. Nobody likes to be 
treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of 
the house, rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis, 
and stewing oil. We get used to these annoyances at 
last, but the dread of the sea remains longer. The sea is 
masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg- 
shells arc drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 27 

with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney 
conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-col- 
ored circle an eternal cemetery ? In our graveyards we 
scoop a pit, but this aggressive water opens mile-wide 
pits and chasms, and makes a mouthful of a fleet. To 
the geologist, the sea is the only firmament ; the land is 
in perpetual flux and change, now blown up like a tumor, 
now sunk in a chasm, and the registered observations of 
a few hundred years find it in a perpetual tilt, rising and 
falling. The sea keeps its old level ; and 't is no wonder 
that the history of our race is so recent, if the roar of the 
ocean is silencing our traditions. A rising of the sea, 
such as has been observed, say an inch in a century, from 
east to west on the land, will bury all the towns, monu- 
ments, bones, and knowledge of mankind, steadily and 
insensibly. If it is capable of these great and secular 
mischiefs, it is quite as ready at private and local dam- 
age ; and of this no landsman seems so fearful as the sea- 
man. Such discomfort and such danger as the narratives 
of the captain and mate disclose are bad enough as the 
costly fee we pay for entrance to Europe ; but the won- 
der is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. 
And here, on the second day of our voyage, stepped out 
a little boy in his shirt-sleeves, wlio had hid himself, 
whilst the ship was in port, in the bread-closet, having 
no money, and wishing to go to England. The sailors 
have dressed him in Guernsey frock, with a knife in his 
belt, and he is climbing nimbly about after them, " likes 
the work first-rate, and, if the captain will take him, means 
now to come back again in the ship." The mate avers 
that this is the history of all sailors ; nine out of ten are 



28 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

runaway boys ; and adds, tliat all of them are sick of the 
sea, but stay in it out of pride. Jack has a Hfe of risks, 
incessant abuse, and the worst pay. It is a little better 
with the mate, and not very much better with the cap- 
tain. A hundred dollars a month is reckoned high pay. 
If sailors were contented, if they had not resolved again 
and again not to go to sea any more, I should respect 
them. 

Of course, the inconveniences and terrors of the sea 
are not of any account to those whose minds are pre- 
occupied. The water-laws, arctic frost, the mountain, 
the mine, only shatter cockneyism ; every noble activity 
makes room for itself. A great mind is a good sailor, 
as a great heart is. And the sea is not slow in disclosing 
inestimable secrets to a good naturalist. 

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some 
piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad 
weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best 
economist. Classics which at home are drowsily read 
have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom 
of a merchant brig. I remember tliat some of the hap- 
piest and most valuable hours I have owed to books, 
passed, many years ago, on shipboard. The worst im- 
pediment 1 have found at sea is the want of light in the 
cabin. 

We found on board the usual cabin library ; Basil 
Hall, Dumas, Dickens, Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were 
our sea-gods. Among the passengers, there was some 
variety of talent and profession ; we exchanged our 
experiences, and all learned something. The busiest 
talk with leisure and convenience at sea, and sometimes 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 29 

a memorable fact turns up, wliich you have loug had a 
vacant niche for, and seize with the joy of a collector. 
But, under the best conditions, a voyage is one of the 
S3verest tests to try a man. A college examination is 
nothing to it. Sea-days are long, — these lack-lustre, 
joyless days which whistled over us ; but they were few, 
— only fifteen, as the captain counted, sixteen according 
to me. Reckoned from the time when we left soundings, 
our speed w^as such that the captain drew the line of his 
course in red ink on his chart, for the encouragement 
or envy of future navigators. 

It has been said that the King of England would con- 
sult his dignity by giving audience to foreign ambassa- 
dors in the cabin of a man-of-war. And I think the 
■white path of an Atlantic ship the right avenue to the 
palace front of this sea-faring people, who for hundreds 
of years claimed the strict sovereignty of the sea, and 
exacted toll and the striking sail from the sliips of all 
otiier peoples. When their privilege was disputed by 
the Dutch and other junior marines, on the plea that you 
could never anchor on the same wave, or hold property in 
what was always flowing, the English did not stick to 
claim the channel, or bottom of all the main. " As if," 
said they, " we contended for the drops of the sea, and 
not for its situation, or the bed of those waters. The sea 
is bounded by his Majesty's empire." 

As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This was 
inevitably the British side. In every man's thought 
arises now a new system, English sentiments, English 
loves and fears, English history and social modes. Yes- 
terday, every passenger had measured the speed of the 



30 ENGLISH THAITS. 

sliip by watcliiiig the bubbles over the ship's bulwarks. 
To-da3% instead of bubbles, we measure by Kinsale, Cork, 
Waterford, and Ardmore, There lay the green shore ol' 
Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see towns, 
towers, churclies, harvests ; but the curse of eight hun- 
dred years we could not discern. 



CHAPTER III. 

LAND. 

Alfieri thought Italy and England the only countries 
worth living in : the former, because there Nature vin- 
dicates her rights, and triumphs over the evils inflicted 
by the governments; the latter, because art conquers 
nature, and transforms a rude, ungenial land into a para- 
dise of comfort and plenty. England is a garden. Un- 
der an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and 
rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil 
instead of a plough. The solidity of the structures that 
compose the towns speaks the industry of ages. Nothing 
is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the sea 
itself, feel the hand of a master. The long habitation of 
a powerful and ingenious race has turned every rood of 
land to its best use, has found all the capabilities, the 
arable soil, the quarriable rock, the highways, the by- 
ways, the fords, the navigable waters ; and the new arts 
of intercourse meet you everywhere ; so that England is 
a huge phalanstery, where all that man wants is provided 
within the precinct. Cushioned and comforted in every 



LAND. 31 

111 inner, tlie traveller rides as on a cannon-ball, high and 
low, over rivers and towns, through mountains, in tun- 
nels of three or four miles, at near twice the speed of our 
trains ; and reads quietly the Times newspaper, which, 
by its immense correspondence and reporting, seems to 
Lave machinized the rest of the world for his occasion. 

The problem of the travell°.r landing at Liverpool is, 
Wiiy England is England. What are the elements of 
tliiit power which the English hold over other nations ? 
If there be one test of national genius universally 
accepted, it is success ; and if there be one successful 
country in the universe for the last millennium, that 
country is England. 

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best 
of actual nations ; and an American has more reasons 
than another to draM'- him to Britain. In all that is done 
or begun by the Americans towards right thinking or 
practice, we are met by a civilization already settled and 
overpowering. The culture of the day, the thoughts and 
aims of men, are English thoughts and aims. A nation 
considerable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, in 
the last centuries, obtained the ascendant, and stamped 
the knowledge, activity, and power of mankind with its 
impress. Those who resist it do not feel it or obey it 
less. The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English. 
The Turk and Chinese also are making awkward efforts 
to be English. The practical common-sense of modern 
society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opin- 
ion, religion, take, is the natural genius of the British 
mind. The influence of France is a constituent of modern 
civility, but not enough opposed to the English for the 



32 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

most wliolesome effect. The American is only the con- 
tinuation of the English genius into new conditions, more 
or less propitious. 

See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, 
every biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still 
English history and manners. So that a sensible English- 
man once said to me, " As long as you do not grant us 
copyright, we shall have the teaching of you." 

But we have the same difficulty in making a social or 
moral estimate of England, as the sheriff finds in drawing 
a jury to try some cause which has agitated the whole 
community, and on which everybody finds himself an 
interested party. Officers, jurors, judges, have all taken 
sides. England has inoculated all nations with her civil- 
ization, intelligence, and tas< es ; and, to resist the tyranny 
and prepossession of the British element, a serious man 
must aid himself, by comparing with it the civilizations 
of the farthest east and west, the old Greek, tlie Oriental, 
and, much more, the ideal standard, if only by means of 
the very impatience which English forms are sure to 
awaken in independent minds. 

Besides, if we wall visit London, the present time is 
the best time, as some signs portend that it has reached 
its highest point. It is observed that the English interest 
us a little less withhi a few years ; and hence the im- 
pression that the British power has culminated, is in 
solstice, or already declining. 

As soon as you enter England, which, with Wales, is 
no larger than the State of Georgia,* this little land 

* Add South Carohna, and you have more than an equivalent 
for the area of Scotland. 



LAND. 33 

stretches by an ilhision to tbe dimensions of an empire. 
The innumerable details, the crowded succession of 
towns, cities, cathedrals, castles, and great and decorated 
estates, the number and power of the trades and guilds, 
the military strength and splendor, the multitudes of lich 
and of remarkable people, the servants and equipages, — 
all these catching the eye, and never allowing it to pause, 
hide all boundaries, by the impression of magnificence 
and endless wealth. 

I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and 
that object indispensably to be seen, — Yes, to see Eng- 
land well needs a hundred years ; for, what they told me 
was the merit of Sir John Soane's Museum, in London, 
— that it was well packed and well saved, — is the merit 
of England; — it is stuffed full, in all corners and crevices, 
with towns, towers, churches, villas, palaces, hospitals, 
and charity-houses. In the history of art, it is a long 
way from a cromlech to York minster ; yet all the hiter- 
mediate steps may still be traced in this all-preserving 
island. 

The territory has a singular perfection. The climate 
is warmer by many degrees than it is entitled to by lat- 
itude. Neither hot nor cold, there is no hour in the 
whole year when one cannot work. Here is no winter, 
but such days as we have in Massachusetts in November, 
a temperature which makes no exhausting damand on 
human strength, but allows the attainment of the largest 
stature. Charles the Second said, "It invited men 
abroad more days in the year and more hours in the day 
than another country." Then England has all the mate- 
rials of a working country except wood. The constant 
2* c 



34 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

rain — a rain with every tide, in some parts of tlie island 
— keeps its multitude of rivers fidl, and brings agricul- 
tuial production up to the higliest point. It has plenty 
of water, of stone, of potter's clay, of coal, of salt, and of 
iron. Tlie land naturally abounds with game, innnense 
heaths and downs are paved with quails, grouse, and 
woodcock, and the shores are animated by water-birds. 
The rivers and the surrounding sea spawn with fish; 
there are salmon for the rich, aud sprats and herrings for 
tlie poor. In the northern lochs, the herring are in 
innumerable shoals ; at one season, the country people 
say, the lakes contain one part water and two parts fish. 

The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is 
the darkness of its sky. The night and day are too nearly 
of a color. It strains the eyes to read and to write. Add 
the coal-smoke. In the manufacturing towns, the hue 
soot or blacks darken the day, give white sheep the color 
of black sheep, discolor the human saliva, contaminate 
the air, poison many plants, and corrode the monuments 
and buiklings. 

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, 
and sometimes justifies the epigram on the climate by an 
English wit, " in a fine day, looking up a chimney ; in a 
foul day, looking down one." A gentleman in Liverpool 
told me that he found he could do without a fire in his 
parlor about one day in the year. It is however pre- 
tended, that the enormous consumption of coal in the 
island is also felt in modifying the general climate. 

Factitious climate, factitious position. England re- 
sembles a ship in its shape, and, if it were one, its best 
admiral could not have Morked it, or anchored it in a 



LxVND. 35 

more judicious or effective position. Sir John Herseliel 
said, " London was the centre of the terrene globe." 
The shopkeeping nation, to use a shop word, has a good 
stand. The old Venetians pleased themselves with tlie 
flattery, that Venice was in 45°, midway between tlie 
poles and the line ; as if that were an imperial centrality. 
Long of old, the Greeks fancied Delphi the navel of the 
earth, in their favorite mode of fabling the eartli to be an 
animal. The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. 
I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that 
the city of Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt, 
and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the 
cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a 
patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, 
nuder his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. 
But, when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to 
Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious 
scholars of all those capitals. 

But England is ancliored at the side of Europe, and 
riglit in the heart of the modern world. Tlie sea, wliich, 
according to Virgil's famous line, divided the poor 
Britons utterly from the world, proved to be the ring of 
marriage with all nations. It is not down in the books, 
— it is written oil4y in the geologic strata, — that fortu- 
nate day when a wave of the German Ocean burst the old 
isthmus which joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and 
gave to this fragment of Europe its impregnable sea-wall, 
cutting off an island of eiglit hundred miles in length, 
with an irregular breadth reaching to three hundred 
miles ; a territory large enougli for independence en- 
riched with every seed of national power, so near, that it 



36 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

can see tlie harvests of the continent ; and so far, that 
who woukl cross the strait must he an expert mariner, 
ready for tempests. As America, Europe, and Asia Jie, 
these Britons have precisely the best commercial position 
in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for all the 
goods they can manufacture. And to make these advan- 
tages avail, the river Thames must dig its spacious outlet 
to the sea from the heart of the kingdom, giving road and 
landing to innumerable ships, and all the conveniency to 
trade, that a people so skilful and sufficient in economiz- 
ing water-front by docks, warehouses, and lighters re- 
quired. When James the First declared his purpose of 
punishing London by removing his Court, the Lord 
Mayor replied, " that, in removing his royal presence from 
his lieges, they hoped he would leave them the Thames." 
In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of 
Europe, having plain, forest, marsh, river, sea-shore; 
mines in Cornwall; caves in Matlock and Derbyshire; 
delicious landscape in Dovedale, delicious sea-view at Tor 
Bay, Highlands in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales ; and, 
in Westmoreland and Cumberland, a pocket Switzerland, 
in which the lakes and mountains are on a sufficient scale 
to fill the eye and touch the imagination. It is a nation 
conveniently small. Eontenelle thought, that nature had 
sometimes a little affectation ; and there is such an arti- 
ficial completeness in this nation of artificers, as if there 
were a design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger 
Birmingham. Nature held counsel with herself, and said, 
' My Romans are gone. To build my new empire, I will 
choose a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength. 
I will not grudge a competition of the roughest males. 



RACE. 37 

Let buffalo j^^orc bufTalo, and the pasture to the strong- 
est ! Tor I liave work that requires the best will and 
sinew. Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow, 
to keep that will alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin 
the people from others, and knit them to a fierce nation- 
ality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long 
time I will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border- 
wars, sea-faring, sea-risks, and the stimulus of gain. An 
island, — but not so large, the people not so many as to 
glut the great markets and depress one another, but pro- 
portioned to the size of Europe and the continents.' 

With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil 
influence radiate. It is a singular coincidence to this 
geographic centrality, the spiritual centrality, which 
Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the people. "For the 
English nation, the best of them are in the centre of all 
Christians, because they have interior intellectual light. 
This appears conspicuously in the spiritual world. This 
light they derive from the liberty of speaking and writing, 
and thereby of thinking." 



CHAPTEE IV. 

RACE. 

An ingenious anatomist has written a book* to prove 
that races are imperishable, but nations are pliant politi- 
cal constnictions, easily changed or destroyed. But this 
writer did not found his assumed races on any necessary 

* The Races, a Fragment. By Robert Kqox. London : 1850. 



38 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

law, disclosing tlieir ideal or metaphysical necessity ; nor 
did he, on tlie other hand, count with precision the exist- 
ing races, and settle the true bounds ; a point of nicety, 
and the popular test of the theory. The individuals at 
the extremes of divergence in one race of men are as un- 
like as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades 
down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw 
the line where a race begins or ends. Hence every writer 
makes a different count. Blumenbach reckons five races ; 
Humboldt, three ; and Mr. Pickering, who lately, in our 
Exploring Expedition, thinks he saw all the kinds of men 
that can be on the planet, makes eleven. 

The British Empire is reckoned to contain (in 184S) 
222,000,000 souls, — perhaps a fifth of the population 
of the globe ; and to comprise a territory of 5,000,000 
square miles. So far have British people predominated. 
Perhaps forty of these millions are of British stock. Add 
the United States of America, which reckon (in the same 
year), exclusive of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a 
territory of 3,000,000 square miles, and in which the 
foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly assimi- 
lated, and you have a population of English descent and 
language, of 60,000,000, and governing a population of 
245,000,000 souls. 

The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a 
half millions in the liome countries. What makes this 
census important is the quality of the units that compose 
it. They are free forcible men, in a country where life is 
safe, and has reached the greatest value. They give the 
bias to the current age ; and that, not by chance or by 
mass, but by their character, and by the number of indi- 



RACE. 39 

vidiials among them of personal ability. It lias been de- 
nied that the English have genius. Be it as it may, men 
of vast intellect have been born on their soil, and they 
have made or applied the principal inventions. They 
have sound bodies, and supreme endurance in war and in 
labor. The spawning force of the race has sufficed to 
the colonization of great parts of the world ; yet it re- 
mains to be seen whether they can make good the exodus 
of millions from Great Britain, amounting, in 1852, to 
more than a tliousand a day. They have assimilating 
force, since they are imitated by their foreign subjects ; 
and they are still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging 
the dominion of their arts and liberty. Their laws are 
hospitable, and slavery does not exist under them. What 
oppression exists is incidental and temporary ; their suc- 
cess is not sudden or fortunate, but they have maintained 
constancy and self-equality for many ages. 

Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause ? 
Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Every- 
body likes to know that his advantages cannot be attrib- 
uted to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quar- 
ries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to su- 
perior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him. 

We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like 
that law of physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or 
essential organ is found in one healthy individual, the 
same part or organ may be found in or near the same 
place in its congener; and we look to find in the son 
every mental and moral property that existed in the 
ancestor. In race, it is not the broad shoulders, or lithe- 
ness, or stature that give advantage, but a symmetry that 



40 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

roaches as far as to llic wit. Then tlio miracle and re- 
nown begin. Then first we care to examine the pedigree, 
and copy heedfully the training, — wiiat food they ate, 
what nursing, school, and exercises they had, which re- 
sulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of thought, and robust 
wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred, and 
Roger Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, 
Philip Sidney, Isaac Newton, WilHam Sliakspeare, George 
Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane, 
to exist here? What made these delicate natures? was 
it the air? was it the sea? was it the parentage ? For 
it is certain that these men are samples of their contem- 
poraries. The hearing ear is always found close to the 
speaking tongue ; and no genius can loug or often utter 
anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by 
men around him. 

It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of 
India under the dominion of a remote island in the north 
of Europe, Race avails much, if that be true, which is 
alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons arc 
Protestants ; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons 
the representative principle. Race is a controlling in- 
fluence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under 
every climate, has preserved the same character and 
employments. Race in the negro is of appalling impor- 
tance. The French in Canada, cut off from all inter- 
course with the parent people, have held their national 
traits. I chanced to read Tacitus "on the Manners of 
the Germans," not long since, in Missouri, and the 
heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resem- 
blance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest. 



RACE. 41 

and our Iloosiers, Suckers, and Bachjers of the American 
woods. 

But whilst race works immortally to keep iis own, it 
is resisted by other forces. Civilization is a re-agent, 
and eats away the old traits. The Arabs of to-day are 
the Arabs of Pharaoh ; but the Briton of to-day is a very 
different person from Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each 
religious sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists 
have acquired a face ; the Quakers, a face ; the nuns, a 
face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his 
manners. Trades and professions carve their own lines 
on face and form. Certain circumstances of English 
life are not less effective : as, personal liberty ; plenty of 
food ; good ale and mutton ; open market, or good wages 
for every kind of labor ; high bribes to talent and skill ; 
tlie island life, or the million opportunities and outlets 
for expanding and misplaced talent ; readiness of com- 
bination among themselves for politics or for business ; 
strikes ; and sense of superiority founded on habit of 
victory in labor and in war ; and the appetite for su- 
periority grows by feeding. 

It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race. 
Credence is a main element. 'T is said, that the views of 
nature held by any people determine all their institutions. 
Whatever influences add to mental or moral faculty, take 
men out of nationality, as out of other conditions, and 
make the national life a culpable compromise. 

Tliese limitations of the formidable doctrine of race 
suggest others which threaten to undermine it, as not 
sufficiently based. The fixity or inconvertibleness of 
races as we see them, is a weak argument for the eter- 



42 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

nity of iliese frail boundaries, since all our lilstorical 
l)eriod is a point to the duration in which nature has 
wrought. Any the least and solitariest fact in our natu- 
ral history, such as the melioration of fruits and of ani- 
mal stocks, has the worth of a power in the opportunity 
of geologic periods. Moreover, though we flatter the 
self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, 
all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of 
races, and strange resemblances meet us everywhere. It 
need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and 
lionian, Saxon and Tartar, should mix, when we see the 
rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and 
know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that 
some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas. 

The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth, 
a jelly, or a straight worm. As the scale mounts, the 
organizations become complex. We are piqued with 
pure descent, but nature loves inoculation. A child 
blends in his face the faces of both parents, and some 
feature from every ancestor whose face hangs on the 
wall. The best nations are those. most widely related; 
and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the 
most potent advancer of nations. 

The English composite character betrays a mixed ori- 
gin. Everything English is a fusion of distant and an- 
tagonistic elements. The language is mixed ; the names 
of men are of different nations, — three languages, three 
or four nations ; — the currents of thought are counter: 
contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and 
dead conservatism ; world-wide enterprise, and devoted 
use and wont ; aggressive freedom and hospitable law. 



UACE. 43 

with bitter class legislation ; a people scattered by their 
wars and affairs over the face of the whole earth, and 
homesick to a man ; a country of extremes, — dukes and 
chartists. Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers ; 
— nothing can be praised in it without damning excep- 
tions, and nothing denounced without salvos of cordial 
praise. 

Neither do this people appear to be of one stem ; but 
collectively a better race than any from which they are 
derived. Nor is it easy to trace it home to its original 
seats. Who can call by right names what races are in 
Britain ? Who can trace them historically ? Who can 
discriminate them anatomically, or metaphysically? 

In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction on the 
historical question of race, and — come of whatever dis- 
putable ancestry — the indisputable Englishman before 
me, himself very well marked, and nowhere else to be 
found, — I fancied I could leave quite aside the choice of 
a tribe as his lineal progenitors. Defoe said in his wrath, 
" the Englishman was the mud of all races." I incline 
to the belief that, as water, lime, and sand make mortar, 
so certain temperaments marry well, and, by well-man- 
aged contrarieties, develop as drastic a character as the 
English. On the whole, it is not so much a history of 
one or of certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, 
coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is 
an anthology of temperaments out of them all. Certain 
temperaments suit the sky and soil of England, say eight 
or ten or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred pear- 
trees, eight or ten suit the soil of an orchard, and thrive, 
whilst all the unadapted temperaments die out. 



41 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

The English derive ilicir pedigree from siicli a range 
of natioiialilies, tliat there needs sea-rooui and hmd-ruoiii 
to unfold the varieties of talent and character. Perliaps 
the ocean serves as a galvanic battery to distribute acids 
at one pole, and alkalies at the other. So England 
tends to accumulate her Liberals in America, and her 
conservatives at London. The Scandinavians in her race 
still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, tlie 
ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead stilh 

Again, as if to intcnsate the influences tliat are not of 
race, what we think of when we talk of English trails 
really narrows itself to a small district. It excludes 
Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales, and reduces itself 
at last to London, that is, to those who come and 
go thither. The portraits that hang on the walls in the 
Academy Exhibition at London, the figures in Punch's 
drawings of the public men, or of the club-houses, tiie 
prints in the shop-windows, are distinctive English, and 
not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish : but 't is a very 
restricted nationality. As you go north into the manu- 
facturing and agricultural districts, and to the population 
that never travels, as you go into Yorkshire, as you enter 
Scotland, the world's Englishman is no longer found. 
In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien 
and manners ; a provincial eagerness and acuteness ap- 
pear ; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked, 
and a coarseness of manners ; and, among the intellec- 
tual, is the insanity of dialectics. In Ireland, are the 
same climate and soil -as in England, but less food, no 
right relation to the land, political dependence, small 
tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race. 



BACE. 4-5 

These queries concerning ancestry and blood may l)e 
well allowed, for there Is no prosperity that seems more 
to depend on the kind of man than British prosperity. 
Only a hardy and wise people could have made this small 
territory great. We say, in a regatta or yacht-race, that 
if the boats are anywhere nearly matched, it Is the man 
that wins. Put the best sailing-master into either boat, 
and lie will win. 

Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of unbroken 
traditions, though vague, and losing themselves in fable. 
The traditions have got footing, and refuse to be dis- 
turbed. The kitchen clock is more convenient than 
sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we 
do by the LInnffian classification, for convenience, and not 
as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently con- 
founded, when the best-settled traits of one race are 
claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely character- 
istic of the rival tribe. 

I found plenty of well-marked English types, the 
ruddy complexion fair and plump, robust men, with faces 
cut like a die, and a strong island speech and accent; 
a Norman type, Avith the complacency that belongs to 
that constitution. Others, who might be Americans, for 
anything that appeared in their complexion or form : and 
their speech was much less marked, and their thought 
much less bound. We will call them Saxons. Then 
the Roman has implanted his dark complexion in the 
trinity or quaternlty of bloods. 

1. The sources from which tradition derives their 
stock are mainly three. And, first, they are of the 



46 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

oldest blood of the world, — tlie Celtic. Some peoples 
are deciduous or trausitory. Where are the Greeks? 
where the Etrurians ? where the Romaus ? But the 
Celts or Sidonides are an old family, of whose beginning 
there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still 
more remote in the future ; for they have endurance and 
productiveness. They planted Britain, and gave to the 
seas and mountains names which are poems, and imitate 
the pure voices of nature. Tliey are favorably remem- 
bered in the oldest records of Europe. They had no 
violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the 
land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture, 
and a sublime creed. They have a hidden and precarious 
genius. They made the best popular literature of the 
Middle Ages in the songs of Merlin, and the tender and 
delicious mythology of Arthur. 

2. The English come mainly from the Germans, whom 
the Romans found hard to conquer in two hundred and 
ten years, — say, impossible to conquer, — when one 
remembers the long sequel ; a people about whom, in the 
old empire, the rumor ran, there was never any that med- 
dled with them that repented it not. 

3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of Nar- 
bonnese Gaul, looked out of a window, and saw a fleet 
of Northmen cruising in the Mediterranean. They even 
entered the port of the town where he was, causing no 
small alarm and sudden manning and arming of his gal- 
leys. As they put out to sea again, the emperor gazed 
long after them, his eyes bathed in tears. " I am tor- 
mented with sorrow," he said, " when I foresee the evils 
they will bring on my posterity." There was reason 



RACE. 47 

for thcso Xerxes' tears. Tlie men wlio have built a ship 
and invented the rig, — cordage, sail, compass, and 
pump, — the working in and out of port, have acquired 
much more than a ship. Now arm them, and every 
shore is at their mercy. For, if they have not numerical 
superiority where tliey anchor, they have only to sail a 
mile or two to find it. Bonaparte's art of war, namely, 
of concentrating force on the point of attack, must always 
be theirs who have the choice of the battle-ground. Of 
course they come into the fight from a higher ground of 
power than the land-nations ; and can engage them on 
sliore with a victorious advantage in the retreat. As 
soon as the shores are sufficiently peopled to make 
piracy a losing business, the same skill and courage are 
ready for the service of trade. 

The Heimskrin(/la* or Sagas of the Kings of Norway, 
collected by Snorro Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey 
of English history. Its portraits, like Homer's, are 
strongly individualized. The Sagas describe a monarchi- 
cal republic like Sparta. Tiie government disappears 
before the importance of citizens. In Norway, no Per- 
sian masses fight and perish to aggrandize a king, but 
the actors are bonders or landholders, every one of 
whom is named and personally and patronymically de- 
scribed, as the king's friend and companion. A sparse 
population gives this high worth to every man. Individ- 
uals are often noticed as very handsome persons, which 
trait only brings the story nearer to the English race. 
Then the solid material interest predominates, so dear to 

* Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq. Lon- 
don : 1S44. 



48 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

English iiiitlcrsianding, wlicrciii tlic association is logical, 
between merit and land. The heroes of the Sagas are 
not the knights of South Europe. No vaporing of 
France and Spain has corrupted them. Tliey are sub- 
stantial farmers, whom the rough times have forced to 
defend their properties. They have weapons which they 
use in a determined manner, by no means for chivalry, 
but for their acres. They are people considerably 
advanced in rural arts, living amj)hibiously on a rough 
coast, and drawing half their food from the sea, and iialf 
from the land. They have herds of cows, and malt, 
wheat, bacon, butter, and clieese. Tiiey fish in the fiord, 
and hunt the deer. A king among these farmers has a 
varying power, sometimes not exceeding the authority of 
a slieriif. A king was maintained much as, in some of 
our country districts, a winter-schoolmaster is quartered, 
a week here, a week there, and a fortnight on the next 
farm, — on all the farms in rotation. Tliis the king calls 
going into guest-quarters; and it was the only way in 
which, in a poor country, a poor king, with many retain- 
ers, could be kept alive, when he leaves his own farm to 
collect his dues through the kingdom. 

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, 
with good sense, steadiness, Avise speech, and prompt 
action. But they have a singular turn for homicide ; 
their chief end of man is to murder or to be murdered ; 
oars, scythes, harpoons, crow-bars, peat-knives, and hay- 
forks are tools valued by them all the more for their 
charming aptitude for assassinations. A pair of kings, 
after dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting each his 
sword through the other's body, as did Yngve and Alf. 



11 ACE. 49 

Another pair ride out on a morning for a frolic, and, 
finding no Aveapon near, will take the bits out of tlieir 
horses' mouths, and crush each other's heads with tliem, 
as did Alric and Eric. Tlie sight of a tent-cord or a 
cloak-string puts them on hanging somebody, a wife, or 
a husband, or, best of all, a king. If a farmer has so 
much as a hayfork, he sticks it into a King Dag. King 
Ingiald finds it vastly amusing to burn up half a dozen 
kings in a hall, after getting them drunk. Never was 
poor gentleman so surfeited with life, so furious to be rid 
of it, as the Northman. If he cannot pick any other 
quarrel, he will get himself comfortably gored by a bull's 
horns, like Egil, or slain by a land-slide, like the agricul- 
tural King Onund. Odin died in his bed, in Sweden ; 
but it was a proverb of ill condition, to die the death of 
old age. King Hake of Sweden cuts and slashes iii bat- 
tle, as long as he can stand, then orders his war-ship, 
loaded with his dead men and their weapons, to be taken 
out to sea, the tiller shipped, and the sails spread ; being 
left alone, he sets fire to some tar-wood, and lies down 
contented on deck. The wind blew off the land, the ship 
flew burning in clear flame, out between the islets into the 
ocean, and there was the right end of King Hake. 

The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical; the later 
are of a noble strain. HFstory rarely yields us better 
passages than the conversation between King Sigurd the 
Crusader, and King Eystein, his brother, on their respec- 
tive merits, — one, the soldier, and the other, a lover of 
the arts of peace. 

But the reader of the Norman history must steel him- 
self by holding fast the remote compensations which 

3 D 



50 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

result from animal vigor. As the old fossil world sliows 
that the first steps of reducing the chaos were confided 
to saurians and other huge and horrible animals, so the 
foundations of the new civility were to be laid by the 
most savage men. 

The Normans came out of France into England worse 
men than they went into it, one hundred and sixty years 
before. They had lost their own language, and learned 
the Romance or barbarous Latin of the Gauls ; and had 
acquired, with the language, all the vices it had names 
for. The conquest has obtained, in the chronicles, the 
name of the " memory of sorrow." Twenty thousand 
thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the 
House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, 
sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. Tiiey were all 
alike, they took everything they could carry, they burned, 
harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything 
English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, how- 
ever, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent 
and dignified men now existing boast their descent from 
these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction 
of their own merits, by assuming for their types the 
swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they 
severally resembled. 

England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the 
tenth and eleventh centuries, and was the receptacle into 
which all the mettle of that strenuous population was 
poured. The continued draught of the best men in Nor- 
way, Sweden, and Denmark, to these piratical expedi- 
tions, exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears 
much fruit when young, and these have been second-rate 



RACE. 51 

powers ever since. The power of tlie race migrated, and 
left Norway void. King Olaf said : " When King Har- 
old, my father, went westward to England, tlie chosen 
men in Norway followed him ; but Norway was so 
emptied then, that such men liave not since been to find 
in the country, nor especially such a leader as King Har- 
old was for wisdom and bravery." 

It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, in 1801, 
the British government sent Nelson to bombard the Dan- 
ish forts in the Sound ; and, in 1807, Lord Cathcart, at 
Copenhagen, took the entire Danish fleet, as it lay in the 
basins, and all the equipments from the Arsenal, and 
carried them to England. Konghelle, the town where 
the kings of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were wont 
to meet, is now rented to a private English gentleman 
for a hunting-ground. 

It took many generations to trim, and comb, and per- 
fume the first boat-load of Norse pirates into royal high- 
nesses and most noble Knights of the Garter : but every 
sparkle of ornament dates back to the Norse boat. 
There will be time enough to mellow this strength into 
civility and religion. It is a medical fact, that the chil- 
dren of the blind see; the children of felons have a 
healthy conscience. Many a mean, dastardly boy is, at 
the age of puberty, transformed into a serious and gen- 
erous youth. 

The mildness of the following ages has not quite 
effaced these traits of Odin ; as the rudiment of a struc- 
ture matured in the tiger is said to be still found unab- 
sorbed in the Caucasian man. Tlie nation has a tough, 
acrid, animal nature, which centuries of churching and 



52 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

civilizing liavc not been able to sweeten. Alfieri said, 
"the crimes of Italy were the proof of the superiority of 
the stock " ; and one may say of England, that this 
watch moves on a splinter of adamant. The English 
uncultured are a brutal nation. Tlie crimes recorded in 
their calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way of 
cold malignity. Dear to the English heart is a fair 
stand-up fight. The brutality of the manners in the 
lower class appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock- 
fighting, love of executions, and in the readiness for a 
set-to in the streets, delightful to the English of all 
classes. The costermongers of London streets hold cow- 
ardice in loathing : — " we must work our fists well ; wo 
are all handy with our fists." The public schools are 
charged with being bear-gardens of brutal strength, and 
are liked by the people for that cause. The fagging is a 
trait of the same quality. Medwin, in the Life of Shelley, 
relates, that, at a military school, they rolled up a young 
man in a snowball, and left him so in his room, while the 
other cadets w^ent to church ; — and crippled him for life. 
They have retained impressment, deck-flogging, army- 
flogging, and school-flogging. Such is the ferocity of 
the army discipline, that a soldier sentenced to flogging, 
sometimes prays that his sentence may be commuted to 
death. Flogging, banished from the armies of Western 
Europe, remains here by the sanction of the Duke of 
Wellington. The right of the husband to sell the wife 
has been retained down to our times. The Jews have 
been the favorite victims of royal and popular persecu- 
tion. Henry III. mortgaged all the Jews in the king- 
dom to his brother, the Earl of Coruwall, as security for 



RACE. 53 

money wliich lie borrowed. The torture of criminals, 
and the rack for extortiag evidence, were slowly disused. 
Of the criminal statutes. Sir Samuel Uomilly said, " I 
have examined the codes of all nations, and ours is the 
worst, and worthy of the Anthropophagi." In the last 
session (18J;8), the House of Commons was listening to 
details of flogging and torture practised in the jails. 

As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a 
hardy people into it, they could not help becoming the 
sailors and factors of the globe. From childliood, they 
dabbled in water, they swum like fishes, their playthings 
were boats. In the case of the ship-money, the judges 
•delivered it for law, that " England being an island, the 
very midland shires therein are all to be accounted mar- 
itime " : and Fuller adds, "the genius even of land-locked 
countries driving the natives with a maritime dexterity." 
As early as the conquest, it is remarked in explanation 
-of the wealth of England, that its merchants trade to all 
countries. 

The Englisli, at the present day, have great vigor of 
body and endurance. Other countrymen look slight and 
undersized beside them, and invalids. They are bigger 
men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English 
taken at random out of the street would weigh a fourth 
more than so many Americans. Yet, I am told, the 
skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy, and 
handsome ; at least, the whole bust is well formed ; and 
there is a tendency to stout and powerful frames. I 
remarked the stoutness, on my first landing at Liverpool ; 
porter, drayman, coachman, guard, — M'hat substantial, 
respectable, grandfatherly figures, with costume and 



54 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

manners to suit. The American has arrived at the old 
mansion-house, and finds himself among uncles, aunts, 
and grandsires. The pictures on the chimney-tiles of his 
nursery were pictures of these people. Here they are in 
the identical costumes and air, which so took him. 

It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky, 
and the women have that disadvantage, — few tall, 
slender figures of flowing shape, but stunted and thickset 
persons. The French say, that the Englishwomen have 
two left hands. But, in all ages, they are a handsome 
race. The bronze monuments of crusaders lying cross- 
legged, in the Temple Church at London, and those in 
Worcester and in Salisbury Cathedrals, which are seven 
hundred years old, are of the same type as the best 
youthful heads of men now in England ; — please by 
beauty of the same character, an expression blending 
good-nature, valor, and refinement, and, mainly, by that 
uncorrupt youth in the face of manhood, which is daily 
seen in the streets of London. 

Both branches of the Scandinavian race are distin- 
guished for beauty. The anecdote of the handsome cap- 
tives which Saint Gregory found at Rome, a. d. GOO, is 
matched by the testimony of the Norman chroniclers, five 
centuries later, who wondered at the beauty and long 
flowing hair of the young English captives. Meantime, 
the Heimskringla has frequent occasion to speak of the 
personal beauty of its heroes. When it is considered 
what humanity, what resources of mental and moral 
power, the traits of the blond race betoken, — its acces- 
sion to empire marks a new and finer epoch, wherein the 
old mineral force shall be subjugated at last by humanity. 



RACE. 55 

and sliall plough in its furrow henceforward. It is not 
a final race, once a crab always crab, but a race with a 
future. 

On the English face are combined decision and nerve, 
with the fair complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid 
aspect. Hence the love of truth, hence the sensibility, 
the fine perception, and poetic construction. The fair 
Saxon man, with open front, and honest meaning', 
domestic, affectionate, is not the wood out of which 
cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made. But he is 
moulded for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the 
nurture of children, for colleges, churches, charities, and 
colonies. 

They are rather manly than warlike. When the war 
is over, the mask falls from the affectionate and domestic 
tastes, which make them women in kindness. This 
union of qualities is fabled in their national legend of 
Beautjj and the Beast, or long before, in the Greek legend 
of Hermaphrodite. The two sexes are co-present in the 
English mind. I apply to Britannia, queen of seas and 
colonies, the words in which her latest novelist portrays 
his heroine : " She is as mild as she is game, and as game 
as she is mild." The English delight in the antagonism 
which combines in one person the extremes of courage 
and tenderness. Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his 
love to Lord Collingwood, and, like an innocent school- 
boy that goes to bed, says, " Kiss me. Hardy," and 
turns to sleep. Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of 
a nature the most affectionate and domestic. Admiral 
llodncy's figure approached to delicacy and effeminacy, 
and he declared himself very sensible to fear, which he 



56 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

surmounted only by considerations of lionor and public 
duty. Clarendon says, the Duke of Buckingham was so 
modest and gentle, that some courtiers attempted to 
put affronts on him, until they found that tliis modesty 
and effeminacy was only a mask for the most terrible 
determination. And Sir Edward Parry said of Sir John 
Franklin, that, " if he found Wellington Sound open, 
he explored it ; for he was a man who never turned 
liis back on a danger, yet of that tenderness, that he 
would not brush away a mosquito." Even for their 
highwaymen the same virtue is claimed, and Robin Hood 
comes described to us as iultlsslmus pnedonum, the gen- 
tlest thief. But they know where their war-dogs lie. 
Cromwell, Blake, Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson, and 
Wellington are not to be trifled with, and the brutal 
strength which lies at the bottom of society, the animal 
ferocity of the quays and cock-pits, the bullies of the cos- 
termongers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials, and Spitalfields, 
they know how to wake up. 

They have a vigorous health, and last well into middle 
and old age. The old men are as red as roses, and still 
handsome. A clear skin, a peach -bloom complexion, 
and good teeth are found all over the island. Tiiey use 
a plentiful and nutritious diet. The operative cannot 
subsist on water-cresses. Beef, mutton, wheat-bread, and 
malt-liquors are universal among the first-class laborers. 
Good feeding is a chief point of national pride among 
the vulgar, and, in their caricatures, they represent the 
Eronchman as a poor, starved body. It is curious that 
Tacitus found the English beer already in use among tlie 
Germans : " They make from barley or wheat a drink 



UACE. 57 

corrupted into some resemblance to wine," Lord Chief 
Justice Fortescue in Henry VI.'s time, says, " The in- 
habitants of England drink no water, unless at certain 
times, on a religious score, and by way of penance." 
The extremes of poverty and ascetic penance, it would 
seem, never reaclj cold water in England. Wood, the 
antiquary, iu describing the poverty and maceration of 
Father Lacey, an English Jesuit, does not deny him 
beer. He says, " his bed was under a thatching, and the 
way to it up a ladder ; his fare was coarse ; his drink, of 
a penny a gawn, or gallon." 

They have more constitutional energy than any other 
people. They think, with Henri Quatre, that manly 
exercises are the foundation of that elevation of mind 
which gives one nature ascendant over another ; or, with 
the Arabs, that the days spent in the chase are not 
counted in the length of life. They box, run, shoot, 
ride, row, and sail from pole to pole. They eat and 
drink, and live jolly in the open air, putting a bar of 
solid sleep between day and day. They walk and ride 
as fast as they can, their heads bent forward, as if urged 
on some pressing affair. The French say, that English- 
men in the street always walk straight before them like 
mad dogs. Men and women walk with infatuation. As 
soon as he can handle a gun, hunting is the fine art of 
every Englishman of condition. They are the most vo- 
racious people of prey that ever existed. Every season 
turns out the aristocracy into the country, to shoot and 
fish. The more vigorous run out of the island to Eu- 
rope, to America, to Asia, to Africa, and Australia, to 
hunt with fury by gun, by trap, by harpoon, by lasso, 
3* 



58 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

with clog, witli liorse, with elephant, or with dromedary, 
all the game that is in nature. These men have written 
the game-books of all countries, as Hawker, Scrope, 
Murray, Herbert, Maxwell, Cunniiing, and a host of 
travellers. The people at home are addicted to boxing, 
running, leaping, and rowing matches. 

I suppose, the dogs and horses must be thanked for the 
fact, that the men have muscles almost as tough and 
supple as their own. If in every efficient man, there is 
first a fine animal, in the English race it is of the best 
breed, a wealthy, juicy, broad-chested creature, steeped 
in ale and good cheer, and a little overloaded by his 
flesh. Men of animal nature rely, like animals, on their 
instincts. The Englishman associates well with dogs and 
horses. His attachment to the horse arises from the 
courage and address required to manage it. The horse 
finds out who is afraid of it, and does not disguise its 
opinion. Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians 
like the company of horses better than the company of 
professors. I suppose, the horses are better company 
for them. The horse has more uses than Buffoii noted. 
If you go into the streets, every driver in bus or dray 
is a bully, and, if I wanted a good trooop of soldiers, I 
should recruit among the stables. Add a certain degree 
of refinement to the vivacity of these riders, and you 
obtain the precise quality which makes the men and 
women of polite society formidable. 

They come honestly by their horsemanship, with Hengst 
and Horsa for their Saxon founders. The other branch 
of their race had been Tartar nomads. The horse was all 
their wealth. The children were fed on mares' milk. 



UACE. 59 

Tlie pastures of Tartary were still remembered by the 
tenacious practice of the Norsemen to eat horse-flesh at 
religious feasts. In the Danish invasions, tlie marauders 
seized upon horses where they landed, and were at once 
converted into a body of expert cavalry. 

At one time, this skill seems to have declined. Two 
centuries ago, the English horse never performed any 
eminent service beyond the seas ; and the reason as- 
signed was, that the genius of the English hath always 
more inclined them to foot-service, as pure and proper 
manhood, without any mixture; whilst, in a victory 
on horseback, the credit ought to be divided betwixt 
the man and his horse. But in two hundred years, a 
change has taken place. Now, they boast that they un- 
derstand horses better than any other people in the world, 
and that their horses are become their second selves. 

"William the Conqueror being," says Camden, "better 
affected to beasts than to men, imposed heavy fines and 
punishments on those that should meddle with his game." 
The Saxon Chronicle says, " he loved the tall deer as if 
he were their father." And rich Englishmen have fol- 
lowed his example, according to their ability, ever since, 
in encroaching on the tillage and commons with their 
game-preserves. It is a proverb in England, that it is 
safer to shoot a man than a hare. The severity of the 
game-laws certainly indicates an extravagant sympathy of 
the nation with horses and hunters. The gentlemen are 
always on horseback, and have brought horses to an ideal 
perfection, — the English racer is a factitious breed. A 
score or two of mounted gentlemen may frequently be 
seen running like centaurs down a hill nearly as steep 



60 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

as the roof of a house. Every inn-room is lined with 
pictures of races ; telegraphs communicate, every hour, 
tidings of the heats from Newmarket and Ascot : and the 
House of Commons adjourns over the * Derby Day/ 



CHAPTER V. 

ABILITY. 

TuE Saxon and the Northman are both Scandinavians. 
History does not allow us to fix the limits of the applica- 
tion of these names with any accuracy ; but from the 
residence of a portion of these people in France, and from 
some effect of that powerful soil on their blood and man- 
ners, the Norman has come popularly to represent in 
England the aristocratic, and the Saxon the democratic 
principle. And though, I doubt not, the nobles are of 
both tribes, and the workers of both, yet we are forced 
to use the names a little mythically, one to represent the 
worker, and the other the enjoyer. 

The island was a prize for the best race. Each of the 
dominant races tried its fortune in turn. The Phoenician, 
the Celt, and the Goth had already got in. The Roman 
came, but in the very day when his fortune culminated. 
He looked in the eyes of a new people that was to sup- 
plant his own. He disembarked his legions, erected his 
camps and towers, — presently he heard bad news from 
Italy, and worse and worse, every year : at last, he made 
a handsome compliment of roads and walls, and departed. 
But the Saxon seriously settled in the land, builded. 



ABILITY. 61 

tilled, fished, and traded, with German truth and adhe- 
siveness. The Dane came, and divided with him. Last 
of all, the Norman, or French-Dane, arrived, and formally 
conquered, harried, and ruled the kingdom. A century 
later, it came out, that the Saxon had the most bottom 
and longevity, had managed to make the victor speak the 
language and accept the law and usage of the victim ; 
forced tiie baron to dictate Saxon terms to Norman 
kings ; and, step by step, got all the essential securities 
of civil liberty invented and confirmed. The genius of 
the race and the genius of the place conspired to this 
effect. The island is lucrative to free labor, but not 
worth possession on other terms. The race was so intel- 
lectual, that a feudal or military tenure could not last 
longer than the war. The power of the Saxon-Danes, so 
thoroughly beaten in the war, that the name of English 
and villein were synonymous, yet so vivacious as to extort 
charters from the kings, stood on the strong personality 
of these people. Sense and economy must rule in a world 
Avhich is made of sense and economy, and the banker, 
with his seven per cent, drives the earl out of his castle. 
A nobility of soldiers cannot keep down a commonalty 
of shrewd scientific persons. Wiiat signifies a pedigree 
of a hundred links, against a cotton-spinner with steam 
in his mill ; or, against a company of broad-shouldered 
Liverpool merchants, for whom Stephenson and Brunei 
are contriving locomotives and a tubular bridge ? 

These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They have 
the taste for toil, a distaste for pleasure or repose, 
and the telescopic appreciation of distant gain. They 
are the wealth-makers, — and by dint of mental faculty 



62 ENGLISH TEAITS. 

Avliicli lias its own conditions. The Saxon works after 
liking, or, only for himself; and to set him at work, and 
to begin to draw his monstrous values out of barren 
Britain, all dishonor, fret, and barrier must be removed, 
and then his energies begin to pla}^ 

The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by Trolls, 
— a kind of goblin men, with vast power of work and 
skilful production, — divine stevedores, carpenters, reap- 
ers, smiths, and masons, swift to reward every kindness 
done them, with gifts of gold and silver. In all English 
history, this dream comes to pass. Certain Trolls or 
working brains, under the names of Alfred, Bede, Caxton, 
Bracton, Camden, Drake, Selden, Dugdale, Newton, 
Gibbon, Brindley, Watt, Wedgwood, dwell in the troll- 
mounts of Britain, and turn the sweat of their face to 
power and renown. 

If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody landed 
on this spell-bound island with impunity. The enchant- 
ments of barren shingle and rough weather transformed 
every adventurer into a laborer. Each vagabond that 
arrived bent his neck to the yoke of gain, or found the 
air too tense for him. The strong survived, the weaker 
went to the ground. Even the pleasure-hunters and sots 
of England are of a tougher texture. A hard tempera- 
ment had been formed by Saxon and Saxon-Dane, and 
such of these French or Normans as could reach it, were 
naturalized in every sense. 

All the admirable expedients or means hit upon in 
England must be looked at as growths or irresistible off- 
shoots of the expanding mind of the race. A man of that 
brain thinks and acts thus; and his neighbor, being 



ABILITY. 63 

afflicted Avith the same kind of brain, tlioiigli lie is rich, 
and called a baron, or a duke, thinks the same thing, and 
is ready to allow the justice of the thought and act in his 
retainer or tenant, though sorely against his baronial or 
ducal will. 

The island was renowned in antiquity for its breed of 
mastiffs, so fierce, that when their teeth were set, you 
must cut their heads off to part them. The man was 
Hke his dog. The people have that nervous bilious 
temperament, which is known by medical men to resist 
every means employed to make its possessor subservient 
to the will of others. The English game is main force to 
main force, the planting of foot to foot, fair play and 
open field, — a rough tug without trick or dodging, till 
one or both come to pieces. King Ethelwald spoke the 
language of his race, when he planted himself at Wim- 
borne, and said, ' he would do one of two things, or there 
live, or there lie.' They hate craft and subtlety. They 
neither poison, nor waylay, nor assassinate ; and, when 
they have pounded each other to a poultice, they will 
shake hands and be friends for the remainder of their 
lives. 

You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, at 
country fairs, at the hustings, and in parliament. No 
artifice, no breach of truth and plain dealing, — not so 
much as secret ballot, is suffered in the island. In par- 
liament, the tactics of the opposition is to resist every 
step of the government, by a pitiless attack ; and in a 
bargain, no prospect of advantage is so dear to the mer- 
chant, as the thought of being tricked is mortifying. 

Sir Kenelin Digby, a courtier of Charles and James, 



64 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

who won the sea-figlit of Scanderoon, was a model 
Englishman in his day. " His person was handsome and 
gigantic, he had so graceful elocution and noble address, 
that, had he been dropt out of the clouds in any part 
of the world, he would have made himself respected : 
he was skilled in six tongues, and master of arts and 
arms." * Sir Kenelm wrote a book, " Of Bodies and 
of Souls," in which he propounds, that " syllogisms do 
breed or rather are all the variety of man's life. They 
are the steps by which we walk in all our businesses. 
Man, as he is man, doth nothing else but weave such 
chains. Whatsoever he doth, swarving from this work, 
he doth as deficient from the nature of man : and, if he 
do aught beyond this, by breaking out into divers sorts 
of exterior actions, he findeth, nevertheless, in this huked 
sequel of simple discourses, the art, the cause, the rule, 
the bounds, aud the model of it."t 

There spoke tlie genius of tlie English people. There 
is a necessity on them to be logical. They would hardly 
greet the good that did not logically fall, — as if it 
excluded their own merit, or shook their understand- 
ings. They are jealous of minds that have much facility 
of association, from an instinctive fear that the seeing 
many relations to their thought might impair this serial 
continuity and lucrative concentration. They are impa- 
tient of genius, or of minds addicted to contemplation, 
and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of thought, 
however lawful, whose steps they cannot count by their 

* Antony Wood. 

t Man's Soule, p. 29. 



ABILITY. 65 

wonted rule. Neither do they reckon better a syllogism 
that ends in syllogism. For they have a supreme eye to 
facts, and theirs is a logic that brings salt to soup, ham- 
mer to nail, oar to boat, the logic of cooks, carpenters, 
and chemists, following the sequence of nature, and one 
on which words make no impression. Their mind is not 
dazzled by its own means, but locked and bolted to 
results. They love men, who, like Samuel Johnson, a 
doctor in the schools, would jump out of his syllogism 
the instant his major proposition was in danger, to save 
that, at all hazards. Their practical vision is spacious, 
and they can hold many threads without entangling 
them. All the steps they orderly take ; but with the 
higli logic of never confounding the minor and major 
proposition; keeping their eye on their aim, in all the 
complicity and delay incident to the several series of 
means they employ. There is room in their minds for 
this and that, — a science of degrees. In the courts, the 
independence of the judges and the loyalty of the suitors 
are equally excellent. In Parliament, they have hit on 
tljat capital invention of freedom, a constitutional opposi- 
tion. And when courts and Parliament are both deaf, 
the plaintiff is not silenced. Calm, patient, his weapon 
of defence from year to year is the obstinate reproduc- 
tion of the grievance, with calculations and estimates. 
But, meantime, he is drawing numbers and money to his 
opinion, resolved that if all remedy fails, right of revolu- 
tion is at the bottom of his charter-box. They are 
bound to see their measure carried, and stick to it 
througii ages of defeat. 

Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice 

E 



66 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

enters, not so apparent in otlier races, — a belief in the 
existence of two sides, and the resolution to see fair play. 
There is on every question an appeal from the assertion 
of the parties to the proof of what is asserted. They are 
impious in their scepticism of a theory, but kiss the dust . 
before a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a 
boxer in the ring, is it a candidate on the hustings, — 
the universe of Englishmen will suspend their judgment, 
until the trial can be had. They are not to be led by 
a phrase, they want a working plan, a working machine, a 
working constitution, and will sit out the trial, and abide 
by the issue, and reject all preconceived theories. In 
politics they put blunt questions, which must be an- 
swered ; who is to pay the taxes ? what will you do for 
trade ? what for corn ? what for the spinner ? 

This singular fairness and its results strike the Trench 
with surprise. Philip de Commines says : " Now, in my 
opinion, among all the sovereignties I know in the world, 
that in which the public good is best attended to, and the 
least violence exercised on the people, is that of Eng- 
land." Life is safe, and personal rights; and what is 
freedom, without security ? whilst, in Erance, ' frater- 
nity,' ' equality,' and * indivisible unity ' are names for 
assassination. Montesquieu said : " England is the 
freest country in the world. If a man in England had 
as niany enemies as hairs on his head, no harm would 
happen to him." 

Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their 
realistic logic or coupling of means to ends, have given 
them the leadership of the modern world. Montesquieu 
said, " No people have true common-sense but those who 



ABILITY. (J7 

arc born in Eiiglantl." Tliis common-sense is a percep- 
tion of all the conditions of our earthly existence, of 
laws tliat can be stated, and of laws that cannot be 
stated, or that are learned only by practice, in which 
allowance for friction is made. They are impious in 
their scepticism of theory, and in high departments they 
are cramped and sterile. But the unconditional surren- 
der to facts, and the choice of means to reach their ends, 
are as admirable as with ants and bees. 

The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They 
love the lever, the screw, and pulley, theElanders draught- 
horse, the waterfall, wind-mills, tide-mills ; the sea and 
the wind to bear their freight-ships. More than the 
diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown- 
jewels, they prize that dull pebble which is wiser than 
a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the 
world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the 
world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. They 
are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at the coarse ; not 
good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron-masters, 
colliers, wool-combers, and tanners in Europe. They 
apply themselves to agriculture, to draining, to resisting 
encroachments of sea, wind, travelling sands, cold and 
Avet subsoil ; to fishery, to manufacture of indispensable 
staples, — salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery, 
and brick, — to bees and silk-worms ; and by their 
steady combinations they succeed. A manufacturer sits 
down to dinner in a suit of clothes which was wool on 
a sheep's back at sunrise. You dine with a gentleman on 
venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, poultry, mushrooms, and 
pineapples, all the growth of his estate. They are neat 



68 ENGLISH TEAITS. 

husbands for ordering all tlieir tools pertaining to house 
and field. All are well kept. There is no want and no 
waste. They study use and fitness in their building, in 
tlie order of their dwelUngs, and in tlieii- dress. The 
Trenchman invented the ruffle, the Englisliman added 
the shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible coat but- 
toned to the chin, of rough but solid and lasting texture. 
If he is a lord, he dresses a little worse than a commoner. 
They have diffused the taste for plain substantial hats, 
shoes, and coats through Europe. They think him the 
best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his use that 
you cannot notice or remember to describe it. 

They secure the essentials in their diet, in their arts 
and manufactures. Every article of cutlery shows, in its 
shape, thought and long experience of workmen. Tliey 
put the expense in the right place, as, in their sea-steam- 
ers, in the solidity of the machinery and the strength of 
the boat. The admirable equipment of their arctic ships 
carries London to the pole. They build roads, aqueducts, 
warm and ventilate houses. And they have impressed 
their directness and practical habit on modern civiliza- 
tion. 

In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody breaks 
who ought not to break ; and, tliat, if he do not make 
trade everything, it will make him nothing ; and acts on 
this belief. Tiie s|urit of system, attention to details, and 
tlie subordination of details, or, the not driving things too 
finely (which is charged on the Germans), constitute that 
despatch of business, which makes the mercantile power 
of England^ 

In war, the Englishman looks to his means. He is of 



ABILITY, 69 

the opinion of Civilis, his German ancestor, whom Tacitus 
reports as holding " that the gods are on the side of the 
strongest " ; — a sentence which Bonaparte unconsciously 
translated, when he said, " that he had noticed, that Provi- 
dence always favored the heaviest battalion." Their mili- 
tary science propounds that if the weight of the advancing 
column is greater than that of the resisthig, the latter is 
destroyed. Therefore WelHngton, when he came to the 
army in Spain, had every man weighed, first with accou- 
trements, and then without ; beheving that the force of 
an army depended on the weight and power of the indi- 
vidual soldiers, in spite of cannon. Lord Palinerstoii 
told the House of Commons, that more care is taken of 
tlie health and comfort of English troops than of any 
other troops in the world ; and that hence the English can 
put more men into the ranks, on the day of action, on the 
Held of battle, than any other army. Before the bombard- 
ment of the Danish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent day 
after day, himself in the boats, on the exhausting service 
of sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin's celebrated ma- 
noeuvre of breaking the line of sea-battle, and Nelson's 
feat of doubling, or stationing his ships one on the outer 
bow, and another on the outer quarter of each of the 
enemy's, were only translations into naval tactics of 
Bonaparte's rule of concentration. Lord CoUingwood 
was accustomed to tell his men, that, if they could fire 
three well-directed broadsides in five minutes, no vessel 
could resist them ; and, from constant practice, they came 
to do it in three minutes and a half. 

But conscious that no race of better men exists, they 
rely most on the simplest means ; and do not like pon- 



70 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

derous and difficult tactics, but delight to bring the affair 
hand to hand, where the victory lies with the strength, 
courage, and endurance of the individual combatants. 
They adopt every improvement in rig, in motor, in weap- 
ons, but they fundamentally believe that the best strat- 
agem in naval war is to lay your ship close alongside of 
the enemy's ship, and bring all your guns to bear on him, 
until you or he go to the bottom. This is the old fashion, 
which never goes out of fashion, neither in nor out of 
England. 

It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious sen- 
timent, and never any whim that they will shed their 
blood for; but usually property, and riglit measured by 
property, that breeds revolution. They have no Indian 
taste for a tomahawk-dance, no French taste for a badge 
or a proclamation. The Englishman is peaceably mind- 
ing his business and earning his day's wages. But if 
you offer to lay hand on his day's wages, on his cow, or 
liis right in conmion, or his shop, he will fight to the 
Judgment. Magna-charta, jury-trial, habeas-corpus, star- 
chamber, ship-money, Popery, Plymouth colony, American 
llevolution, are all questions involving a yeoman's right 
to his dinner, and, except as touching that, would not 
have lashed the British nation to rage and revolt. 

Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of order, 
and of calculation, it must be owned they are capable of 
larger views ; but the indulgence is expensive to them, 
costs great crises, or accumulations of mental power. 
In common, the horse works best with blinders. Noth- 
ing is more in the line of English thought, than our 
unvarnished Connecticut question, "Pray, sir, how do 



ABILITY. 71 

YOU get your living when you are at home ? " The ques- 
tions of freedom, of taxation, of privilege, are money 
questions. Heavy fellows, steeped in beer and flesh- 
pots, they are hard of hearing and dim of sight. Their 
drowsy minds need to be flagellated by war and trade and 
politics and persecution. Tiiey cannot well read a prin- 
ciple, except by the light of fagots and of burning towns. 

Tacitus says of the Germans, " powerful only in sudden 
efforts, they are impatient of toil and labor." Tiiis highly 
destined race, if it had not somewhere added the chamber 
of patience to its brain, would not liave built London. 
I know not from wiiicli of the tribes and temperaments 
that went to the composition of the people this tenacity 
■was supplied, but they clinch every nail they drive. 
They have no running for luck, and no immoderate 
speed. They spend largely on their fabric, and await the 
slow return. Their leather lies tanning seven years in 
the vat. At Rogers's mills, in Sheffield, where 1 was 
shown the process of making a razor and a penknife, I 
was told there is no luck in making good steel; that 
tiiey make no mistakes, every blade in the hundred and 
in the thousand is good. And that is characteristic of 
all their work, — no more is attempted than is done. 

When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard, he 
is told that " nobody is permitted to remain here, unless 
he understand some art, and excel in it all other men." 
The same question is still put to the posterity of Thor. 
A nation of laborers, every man is trained to some one 
art or detail, and aims at perfection in that : not content 
unless he has something in Avhich he thinks he surpasses 
all other men. He would rather not du anvtliinsr at all. 



1% ENGLISH TRAITS. 

than not do it well. I suppose no people have such 
thoroughness : from the highest to the lowest, every man 
meaning to be master of his art. 

"To show capacity," a Frenchman described as the 
end of a speech in debate: "no," said an Englishman, 
"but to set your slioulder at tlie wheel, — to advance the 
business." Sir Samuel Romilly refused to speak in pop- 
idar assemblies, confining himself to the House of Com- 
mons, where a measure can be carried by a speech. The 
business of the House of Commons is conducted by a few 
persons, but these are hard-worked. Sir Robert Peel 
" knew the Blue Books by heart." His colleagues and 
rivals carry Hansard in llieir heads. The high civil and 
legal offices are not beds of case, but posts which exact 
frightful amounts of mental labor. Many of the great 
leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Romilly, are 
soon worked to death. They are excellent judges in 
England of a good worker, and when they find one, like 
Clarendon, Sir Philip Warwick, Sir William Coventry, 
Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel, or 
Kussell, there is nothing too good or too high for him. 

They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a public 
aim. Private persons exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian 
researches, the same pertinacity as the nation showed in 
the coalitions in which it yoked Europe against the 
Empire of Bonaparte, one after the other defeated, and 
still renewed, until the sixth hurled him from his seat. 

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his 
father, who had made the catalogue of the stars of the 
northern hemisphere, expatriated himself for years at the 
Cape of Good Hope, finished his inventory of the southern 



ABILITY. 73 

heaven, came liome, and redacted it in eight years more ; 
— a work whose value does not begin until thirty years 
liave elapsed, and thenceforward a rocord to all ages of 
the higliest import. The Admiralty sent out the Arctic 
expeditions year after year, in search of Sir John Frank- 
lin, until, at last, they have threaded their way through 
polar pack and Behring's Straits, and solved the geo- 
graphical problem. Lord Elgin, at Athens, saw the 
imminent ruin of the Greek remains, set up his scaffold- 
ings, in spite of epigrams, and, after five years' labor to 
collect them, got his marbles on shipboard. The ship 
struck a rock, and went to the bottom. He had them 
all fished up, by divers, at a vast expense, and brought 
to London ; not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli, and 
Canova, and all good heads in all the world, were to be 
his applauders. In the same spirit, were the excavation 
and research by Sir Charles Eellowes, for the Xanthiau 
monument ; and of Layard, for his Nineveh sculptures. 

The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, 
a London extended into every man's mind, though he 
live in Van Dicinan's Land or Capetown. Faithful per- 
formance of what is undertaken to be performed, they 
honor in themselves, and exact in others, as certificate of 
equality with themselves. The modern world is theirs. 
Tliey have made and make it day by day. The commer- 
cial relations of the world are so intimately drawn to 
London, that every dollar on earth contributes to tlie 
streugth of the English government. And if all the 
wealth in the planet should perish by war or deluge, they 
know themselves competent to replace it. 

They have approved their Saxon blood, by their sea- 
4 



74 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

going qualities ; their descent from Odin's smitlis, by 
their liereditary skill in working in iron; their British 
birth, by husbandry and immense wheat harvests ; and 
justified their occupancy of the centre of habitable land, 
by their supreme ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They 
have tilled, builded, forged, spun, and woven. They have 
made the island a thoroughfare ; and London a shop, a 
law-court, a record-office, and scientific bureau, inviting 
to strangers ; a sanctuary to refugees of every political 
and religious opinion ; and such a city, that almost every 
active man, in any nation, finds himself, at one time or 
other, forced to visit it. 

In every path of practical activity, they have gone even 
with the best. There is no secret of war, in which they 
have not shown mastery. The steam-chamber of Watt, 
the locomotive of Stephenson, the cotton-mule of Roberts, 
perform the labor of the world. There is no department 
of literature, of science, or of useful art, in which they 
liave not produced a first-rate book. It is England, 
whose opinion is waited for on the merit of a new inven- 
tion, an improved science. And in the complications of 
the trade and politics of their vast empire, they have been 
equal to every exigency, with counsel and with conduct. 
Is it their luck, or is it in the chambers of their brain, — ■ 
it is their commercial advantage, that whatever light ap- 
pears in better method or happy invention, breaks out in 
their race. They are a family to which a destiny attaches, 
and the Banshee has sworn that a male heir shall never 
be wanting. They have a wealth of men to fill important 
posts, and the vigdance of party criticism insures the 
selection of a competent person. 



ABILITY. 75 

A proof of the energy of the British people is the 
higlily artificial construction of the whole fabric. The 
climate and geography, I said, were factitious, as if 
the hands of man liad arranged the conditions. The 
same character pervades the whole kingdom. Bacon 
said, " Rome was a state not subject to paradoxes " ; but 
England subsists by antagonisms and contradictions. 
Tlie foundations of its greatness are the rolling waves ; 
and, from first to last, it is a museum of anomalies. This 
foggy and rainy country furnishes the world with astro- 
nomical observations. Its short rivers do not afford 
water-power, but the land shakes under the thunder of 
the mills. There is no gold-mine of any importance, but 
there is more gold in England than in all other countries. 
It is too far north for the culture of the vine, but the 
wines of all countries are in its docks. The French 
Comte de Lauraguais said, "no fruit ripens in England 
but a baked apple " ; but oranges and pineapples are as 
clieap in London as in tlie Mediterranean. The Mark- 
Lane Express, or the Custom-House Keturns bear out 
to the letter the vaunt of Pope, — 

" Let India boast her palms, nor envy we 
The weeping amber, nor the spicy tree, 
"While, by our oaks, those precious loads are bonie, 
And realms commanded Avhich those trees adorn." 

The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full 
of artificial breeds. The agriculturist Bakewell created 
sheep and cows and horses to order, and breeds in which 
everything was omitted but what is economical. The cow 
is sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his surloin. Stall-feed- 



76 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

iiig makes sperm-mills of the cattle, and converts the sta- 
ble to a chemical factory. The rivers, lakes, and ponds, 
too much tished, or obstructed by factories, are artificially 
filled with the eggs of sahuon, turbot, and herring. 

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cam- 
bridgeshire are unhealthy and too barren to pay rent. By 
cylindrical tiles, and gutla-percha tubes, five millions of 
acres of bad land have been drained and put on equality 
with the best, for rape-culture and grass. The climate 
too, Avhich was already believed to have become, milder 
and drier by the enormous consumption of coal, is so far 
reached by this new action, that fogs and storms are said 
to disappear. In due course, all England will be drained, 
and rise a second time out of tlie waters. The latest step 
was to call in the aid of steam to agriculture. Steam is 
almost an Englishman. I do not know but they will 
send him to Parliament, next, to make laws. He weaves, 
forges, saws, pounds, fans, and now he must pump, grind, 
dig, and plough for the farmer. The markets created by 
the manufacturing population have erected agriculture 
into a great thriving and spending industry. The value 
of the houses in Britain is equal to the value of the soil. 
Artificial aids of all kinds are cheaper than the natural 
resources. No man can afford to walk, when the parlia- 
mentary train carries him for a penny a mile. Gas- 
burners are cheaper than daylight in numberless floors in 
the cities. All the houses in London buy their water. 
The English trade does not exist for the exportation of 
native products, but on its manufactures, or the making 
well everything which is ill made elsewhere. They make 
ponchos for the Mexican, bandannas for the Hindoo, gin- 



ABILITY. 77 

seng for (lie Cliinese, beads for the Indian, laces for the 
Flemings, telescopes for astronomers, cannons for kings. 

The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece 
and Italy to be placed within the reach of every manu- 
facturing population. They caused to be translated from 
foreign languages and illustrated by elaborate drawings, 
the most approved works of Munich, Berlin, and Paris. 
They have ransacked Italy to find new forms, to add a 
grace to the products of their looms, their potteries, and 
tlieir foundries.* 

The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social 
system. Tlieir law is a network of fictions. Their prop- 
erty, a scrip or certificate of right to interest on money 
that no man ever saw. Their social classes are made by 
statute. Their ratios of power and representation are his- 
torical and legal. The last reform-bill took away politi- 
cal power from a mound, a ruin, and a stone-wall, whilst 
Birmingham and Manchester, whose mills paid for the 
wars of Europe, had no representative. Purity in the 
elective Parliament is secured by the purchase of seats.f 
Foreign power is kept by armed colonies ; power at home^ 
by a standing army of police. The pauper lives better 
Iban the free laborer ; the thief better than the pauper ; 
and the transported felon better than the one under im- 
prisonment. The crimes are factitious, as smuggling, 
poaching, non-conformity, heresy, and treason. Better, 
tliey say in England, kill a man than a hare. The sov- 

* See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. 66, New York, 1853. 

t Sir S. Roniilly, purest of English patriots, decided that 
the only independent mode of entering Parliament was to buy 
a seat, and he houijht Horsham. 



78 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

ereigntj of tlie seas is maintained by the impressment 
of seamen. " Tlie impressment of seamen," said Lord 
Eldon, " is the life of our navy." Solvency is maintained 
by means of a national debt, on the principle, " if you 
will not lend me the money, how can I pay you ? " For 
the administration of justice. Sir Samuel Rom illy 's expe- 
dient for clearing the arrears of business in Chancery, 
was, the chancellor's staying away entirely from his 
court. Their system of education is factitious. The 
Universities galvanize dead languages into a semblance 
of life. Their church is artificial. The manners and 
customs of society are artificial; — made-up men with 
made-up manners ; — and thus the whole is Birmingham- 
ized, and we have a nation whose existence is a work of 
art ; — a cold, barren, almost arctic isle, being made the 
most fruitful, luxurious, and imperial land in the whole 
earth. 

Man in England submits to be a product of political 
economy. On a bleak moor, a mill is built, a banking- 
house is opened, and men come in, as water in a sluice- 
way, and towns and cities rise. Man is made as a Bir- 
mingham button. The rapid doubling of the population 
dates from Watt's steam-engine. A landlord, who owns 
a province, says, " the tenantry are unprofitable ; let me 
have sheep." He unroofs the houses, and ships the popu- 
lation to America. The nation is accustomed to the in- 
stantaneous creation of wealth. It is the maxim of their 
economists, " that the greater part in value of the wealth 
now existing in England has been produced by human 
hands within the last twelve months." Meantime, three or 
four days' rain will reduce hundreds to starving in London. 



ABILITY. 79 

One secret of their power is their mutual good under- 
standing. Not only good minds are born among them, 
but all the people have good minds. Every nation has 
yielded some good wit, if, as has chanced to many tribes, 
only one. But the intellectual organization of the Eng- 
lish admits a communicableness of knowledge and ideas 
among them all. An electric toucli by any of their 
national ideas, melts them into one family, and brings 
the hoards of power which their individuality is always 
hiving, into use and play for all. Is it the smallness of 
the country, or is it the pride and affection of race, — 
they have solidarity, or responsibleness, and trust in each 
other. 

Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is more 
lasting than the cloth. They embrace their cause with 
more tenacity than their life. Though not military, yet 
every common subject by the poll is fit to make a sol- 
dier of. These private reserved mute family-men can 
adopt a public end with all their heat, and this strength 
of affection makes the romance of their heroes. The 
difference of rank does not divide the national heart. 
The Danish poet Oehlenschlager complains, that who 
writes in Danish writes to two hundred readers. In 
Germany, there is one speech for the learned, and another 
for the masses, to that extent, that, it is said, no senti- 
ment or phrase from the works of any great German 
writer is ever heard among the lower classes. But in 
England, the language of the noble is the language of 
the poor. In Parliament, in pulpits, in theatres, when 
the speakers rise to thought and passion, the language 
becomes idiomatic ; the people in the street best under- 



80 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

stand the best words. And their language seems drawn 
from the Bible, the common law, and the works of Sliak- 
speare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns, and 
Scott. The island has produced two or three of the 
greatest men that ever existed, but they were not solitary 
in tlieir own time. Men quickly embodied what Newton 
found out, in Greenwich observatories, and practical 
navigation. The boys knew all that Hutton knew of 
strata, or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-vessels ; 
and these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So 
what is invented or known in agriculture, or in trade, or 
in \var, or in art, or in literature, and antiquities. A 
great ability, not amassed on a few giants, but poured 
into the general mind, so that each of them could at a 
pinch stand in the shoes of the other ; and they are more 
bound in character than differenced in ability or in rank. 
The laborer is a possible lord. The lord is a possible 
basket-maker. Every man carries the English system in 
liis brain, knows what is confided to him, and does 
therein the best he can. The chancellor carries Eugland 
on his mace, the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the 
smith on his hammer, the cook in the bowl of his spoon ; 
the postilion cracks his whip for England, and the sailor 
times his oars to "God save the King!" Tlie very 
felons have their pride in each other's English stancli- 
ness. In politics and in war, they hold together as by 
hooks of steel. The charm in Nelson's history is, the 
unselfish greatness ; the assurance of being supported to 
tiie uttermost by those Mdiom he supports to the utter- 
most. Whilst they are some ages ahead of the rest of 
the world in the art of living ; Mdiilst in some directions 



MANNERS. 81 

they do not represent the modern spirit, but constitute it, 
— this vanguard of civility and power they coldly hold, 
inarching in phalanx, lock-step, foot after foot, file after 
file of heroes, ten thousand deep. 



CHAPTER VI. 

MANNERS. 

I FIND the Englishman to be him of all men who 
stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves 
what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom. On 
the day of my arrival at Liverpool, a gentleman, in de- 
scribing to me tlie Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, happened 
to say, " Lord Clarendon has pluck like a cock, and will 
fight till he dies " ; and, what I heard first I lieard last, 
and the one thing the English value, is pluck. The 
word is not beautiful, but on the quality they signify by 
it the nation is unanimous. The cabmen have it; the 
merchants have it ; the bishops have it ; the women have 
it ; the journals have it ; the Times newspaper, they say, 
is the pluckiest thing in England, and Sidney Suiith had 
made it a proverb, that little Lord John Russell, the 
minister, would take the command of the Channel fleet 
to-morrow. 

They require you to dare to be of your own opinion, 
and they hate the practical cowards who cannot in aifairs 
answer directly yes or no. They dare to displease, nay, 
they will let you break all the commandments, if you do 
it natively, and with spirit. You must be somebody ; 
than you may do this or that, as you will. 

4* ' r 



83 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Macliinery Las been applied to all work, and carried to 
sucli perfection, that little is left for the men but to mind 
the engines and feed the furnaces. But the machines 
require punctual service, and as the}' never tire, they 
prove too much for their tenders. Mines, forges, mills, 
breweries, railroads, steam-pump, steam-plough, drill of 
regiments, drill of police, rule of court, and shop-rule, 
have operated to give a mechanical regularity to all the 
habit and action of men. A terrible machine has pos- 
sessed itself of the ground, the air, the men and women, 
and hardly even thought is free. 

The mechanical might and organization require in the 
people constitution and answering spirits ; and he who 
goes among them must have some weight of metal. At 
last, you take your hint from the fury of life you find, 
and say, one thing is })lain, this is no country for faint- 
hearted people : don't creep about diffidently ; make up 
your mind ; take your own course, and you shall find 
respect and furtherance. 

It requires, men sa}^ a good constitution to travel in 
Spain. I say as much of England, for other cause, sim- 
ply on account of tiie vigor and brawn of the people. 
Nothing but the most serious business could give 
one any counterweight to these Baresarks, though they 
were only to order eggs and muffins for their breakfast. 
The Englishman speaks with all his body. His elocution 
is stomachic, — as the American's is labial. The Eng- 
lishman is very petulant and precise about his accom- 
modation at inns, and on the roads ; a quiddle about his 
toast and his chop, and every species of convenience, 
and loud and pungent in his expressions of impatience at 



MANNERS. S3 

any neglect. His vivacity betrays itself, at all points, in 
his manners, in bis respiration, and tbe inarticulate noises 
he makes in clearing tbe throat, — all significant of burly 
strength. He lias stamina ; he can take the initiative in 
emergencies. He has that aplomb, wbich results from a 
good adjustment of tbe moral and physical nature, and 
tbe obedience of all tbe powers to tb3 will ; as if tbe 
axes of his eyes were united to his backbone, and only 
moved with the trunk. 

This vigor appears in the incuriosity, and stony neglect, 
each of every other. Each man walks, eats, drinks, 
shaves, dresses, gesticulates, and, in every manner, acts, 
and suffers without reference to tbe bystanders, in his own 
fashion, only careful not to interfere with them, or annoy 
them ; not that he is trained to neglect tbe eyes of his 
neighbors, — he is really occupied with bis own affair, 
and does not think of them. Every man in this polished 
country consults only bis convenience, as much as a soli- 
tary pioneer in Wisconsin. I know not where any per- 
sonal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and no man gives 
himself any concern with it. An Englishman walks in 
a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella like a walk- 
ing-stick ; wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands 
on bis head, and no remark is made. And as he has 
been doing this for several generations, it is now in the 
blood. 

In short, every one of these islanders is an island him- 
self, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a company of 
strangers, you would think him deaf; his eyes never wan- 
der from bis table and newspaper. He is never betrayed 
into any curiosity or unbecoming emotion. Tbey have 



84 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

all been trained in one severe school of manners, and 
never put off the harness. He does not give his hand. 
He does not let you meet his eye. It is almost an 
affront to look a man in tlie face, without being intro- 
duced. In mixed or in select companies they do not 
introduce persons ; so that a presentation is a circum- 
stance as valid as a contract. Introductions are sacra- 
ments. He Avithholds his name. At the hotel, he is 
hardly willing to whisper it to the clerk at the book- 
office. If he give you his private address on a card, 
it is like an avowal of friendship ; and his bearing on 
being introduced is cold, even though he is seeking 
your acquaiutance, and is studying how he shall serve 
you. 

It was an odd proof of this impressive energy, that, 
in my lectures, I hesitated to read and tlirew out for its 
impertinence many a disparaging phrase, which I had 
been accustomed to spin, about poor, thin, unable mor- 
tals; so mi ch had the fine physique and the personal 
vigor of this robust race worked on my imagination. 

I happened to arrive in England at the moment of 
a commercial crisis. But it was evident that, let who 
will fail, England will not. These people have sat here 
a thousand years, and here will continue to sit. They 
will not break up, or arrive at any desperate revolution, 
like their neighbors ; for they have as much energy, as 
much continence of character, as they ever had. The 
power and possession which surround them are their own 
creation, and they exert the same connnanding industry 
at this moment. 

They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal, 



MANNERS. 85 

loving routine, aud conventional ways ; loving truth and 
religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form. 
All the world praises the comfort aud private appoint- 
ments of an English inn, and of English households. 
You are sure of neatness and of personal decorum. A 
Erenchman may possibly be clean : an Englishman is 
conscientiously clean. A certain order and complete 
propriety is found in his dress and in his belongings. 

Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him in 
doors whenever he is at rest, and being of an affectionate 
and loyal temper, he dearly loves his house. If he is 
rich, he buys a demesne, and builds a hall ; if he is in 
middle condition, he spares no expense on his house. 
Without, it is all planted ; within, it is wainscoted, 
carved, curtained, hung with pictures, aud filled with 
good furniture. 'T is a passion which survives all others, 
to deck and improve it. Hither he brings all that is rare 
and costly, and with the national tendency to sit fast in 
the same spot for many generations, it comes to be, in 
the course of time, a museum of heirlooms, gifts, aud 
trophies of the adventures and exploits of the family. 
He is very fond of silver plate, and, though he have no 
gallery of portraits of his ancestors, he has of their 
punch-bowls and porringers. Incredible amounts of 
plate are found in good houses, and the poorest have 
some spoon or saucepan, gift of a godmother, saved out 
of better times. 

An English family consists of a few persons, who, 
from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet 
of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense 
as that cartilage which we have seen attachino: the two 



86 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Siamese. Euf^land produces under favorable conditions 
of ease and culture the finest women in the Avorld. 
And, as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the 
women inspire and refine them. Nothing can be more 
delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and 
based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and 
mutual carriage of the sexes. The song of 1590 says, 
" The wife of every Englishman is counted blest." The 
sentiment of Imogen in Cymbeline is copied from Eng- 
lish nature ; and not less the Portia of Brutus, the Kate 
Percy, and the Desdemoua. The romance does not 
exceed the height of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy Hutch- 
inson, or in Lady Russell, or even as one discerns 
through the plain prose of Pepys's Diary, the sacred habit 
of an English wife. Sir Samuel Romilly could not bear 
the death of his wife. Every class has its noble and 
tender examples. 

Domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to 
branch wide and high. The motive and end of their 
trade and empire is to guard the independence and 
privacy of their homes. Nothing so much marks their 
manners as the concentration on their household ties. 
This domesticity is carried into court and camp. Wel- 
lington governed India and Spain and his own troops, 
and fought battles like a good family-man, paid his debts, 
and, though general of an army in Spain, could not stir 
abroad for fear of public creditors. This taste for house 
and parish merits has of course its doting and foohsh 
side. Mr. Cobbett attributes the huge popularity of 
Perceval, prime minister in 1810, to the fact that he 
was wont to go to church every Sunday, with a large 



MANNERS. 87 

quarto gilt prayer-book under one arm, his wife hang- 
ing on tlie other, and followed by a long brood of chil- 
dren. 

They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, 
their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. Tlie Middle 
Ages still lurk in the streets of London. The Knights 
of the Bath take oath to defend injured ladies ; the gold- 
stick-in-waiting survives. They repeated the ceremonies 
of the eleventh century in the coronation of the present 
Queen. A hereditary tenure is natural to them. Offices, 
farms, trades, and traditions descend so. Their leases 
run for a hundred and a thousand years. Terms of 
service and partnership are lifelong, or are inherited. 
" Holdship has been with me," said Lord Eldon, " eight- 
and-twenty years, knows all my business and books." 
Antiquity of usage is sanction enough. Wordsworth 
says of the small freeholders of Westmoreland, " Many 
of these humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that 
the land which they tilled had for more than five hun- 
dred years been possessed by men of the same name 
and blood." The ship-carpenter in the public yards, my 
lord's gardener and porter, have been there for more 
than a hundred years, grandfather, father, and son. 

The English power resides also in their dislike of 
change. They have difficulty in bringing their reason to 
act, and on all occasions use their memory first. As 
soon as they have rid themselves of some grievance, and 
settled the better practice, they make haste to fix it as 
a finality, and never wish to hear of alteration more. 

Every Englishman is an embryonic chancellor : his 
instinct is to search for a precedent. The favorite phrase 



88 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

of tlieir law is, "a custom whereof the memory of man 
runneth not back to the contrary." The barous say, 
'' Nolumus mutari" ; and the cockneys stifle the curi- 
osity of the foreigner on the reason of any practice, witli, 
"Lord, sir, it was always so." Tliey hate innovation. 
Bacon told them, Time was the right reformer; Chat- 
ham, that " confidence was a plant of slow growth " ; 
Canning, to " advance with the times " ; and Welling- 
ton, that "habit was ten times nature." All their 
statesmen learn the irresistibility of the tide of custom, 
and have invented many fine phrases to cover this slow- 
ness of perception, and prehensility of tail. 

A sea-shell should be the crest of England, not only 
because it represents a power built on the waves, but 
also the hard finish of the men. The Englishman is 
finished like a cowry or a murex. After tlie spire and 
the spines are formed, or, with the formation, a juice 
exudes, and a hard enamel varnishes every part. The 
keeping of the proprieties is as indispensable as clean 
linen. No merit quite countervails the want of this, 
whilst this sometimes stands in lieu of all. " 'T is in 
bad taste," is the most formidable word an English- 
man can pronounce. But this japan costs them dear. 
There is a prose in certain Englishmen, which exceeds 
in wooden deadness all rivalry w[\\\ other countrymen. 
There is a knell in the conceit and externality of their 
voice, which seems to say. Leave all hope behind. In 
this Gibraltar of propriety, mediocrity gets intrenched, 
and consolidated, and founded in adamant. An English- 
man of fashion is like one of those souvenirs, bound in 
gold vellum, enriched with delicate engravings, on thick 



MANNERS. 89 

liot-pressed paper, fit for the hands of ladies and princes, 
but with nothing in it worth reading or remembering. 

A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. 
When Thalberg, the pianist, was one eveni)ig performing 
before the Queen, at Windsor, in a private party, the 
Queen accompanied him with her voice. The circum- 
stance took air, and all England shuddered from sea to 
sea. The indecorum was never repeated. Cold, repres- 
sive manners prevail. No enthusiasm is permitted ex- 
cept at the opera. They avoid everything marked. They 
require a tone of voice that excites no attention in tlie 
room. Sir Philip Sidney is one of the patron saints of 
England, of whom Wotton said, "His wit was the meas- 
ure of congruity." 

Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. 
They keep to the other extreme of low tone in dress and 
manners. They avoid pretension and go right to the 
heart of the thing. They bate nonsense, sentimentalism, 
and highflown expression ; they use a studied plainness. 
Even Brummell their fop was marked by the severest 
simplicity in dress. They value themselves on the ab- 
sence of everything theatrical in the public business, and 
on conciseness and going to the point, in private affairs. 

In an aristocratical country, like England, not the 
Trial by Jury, but the dinner is the capital institution. 
It is the mode of doing honor to a stranger, to invite him 
to eat, — and has been for many hundred years. " And 
they think," says the Venetian traveller of 1500, "no 
greater honor can be conferred or received, than to invite 
others to eat with them, or to be invited themselves, and 
they would sooner give five or six ducats to provide an 



90 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

entertainment for a person, than a groat to assist him in 
any distress."* It is reserved to the end of the day, the 
faniily-hoiu being generally six, in London, and, if any 
company is expected, one or two hours later. Every one 
dresses for dinner, in his own house, or in another man's. 
The guests are expected to arrive within half an hour of 
the time fixed by card of invitation, and nothing but death 
or mutilation is permitted to detain them. The English 
dinner is precisely the model on wliich our own are con- 
structed in the Atlantic cities. The company sit one or 
two hours, before the ladies leave the table. The gen- 
tlemen jremain over their wine an hour longer, and re- 
join the ladies in the drawing-room, and take coffee. 
The dress dinner generates a talent of table-talk, Avhicli 
reaches great perfection : the stories are so good, that 
one is sure they must have been often told before, to 
have got such happy turns. Hither come all manner of 
clever projects, bits of popular science, of practical in- 
vention, of miscellaneous humor ; political, literary, and 
personal news ; railroads, horses, diamonds, agriculture, 
horticulture, pisciculture, and wine. 

English stories, bonmots, and the recorded table-talk 
of their wits, are as good as the best of the French. In 
America, we are apt scholars, but have not yet attained 
the same perfection : for the range of nations from which 
London draws, and the steep contrasts of condition, create 
the picturesque in society, as broken country makes pic- 
turesque landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes 
a prairie tameness : and secondly, because the usage of a 

* " Relation of England." Printed by the Camden Society. 



TRUTH. 91 

dress-dinner every day at dark has a tendency to hive and 
produce to advantage everything good. Much attrition 
has worn every sentence into a bullet. Also one meets 
now and then with polished men, who know everything, 
have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite 
superior to letters and science. What could they not, if 
only they would ? 

CHAPTER YII. 

TRUTH. 

The Teutonic tribes have a national singleness of heart, 
which contrasts with the Latin races. The German name 
has a proverbial significance of sincerity and honest mean- 
ing. The arts bear testimony to it. The faces of clergy 
and laity in old sculptures and illuminated missals are 
charged with earnest belief. Add to this hereditary rec- 
titude, the punctuality and precise dealing which com- 
merce creates, and you have the English truth and credit. 
The government strictly performs its engagements. The 
subjects do not understand trifling on its part. When 
any breach of promise occurred, in the old days of pre- 
rogative, it was resented by the people as an intolerable 
grievance. And, in modern times, any slipperiness in the 
government of political faith, or any repudiation or crook- 
edness in matters of finance, would bring the whole nation 
to a committee of inquiry and reform. Private men keep 
their promises, never so trivial. Down goes the flying 
word on the tablets, and is indelible as Domesday Book. 

Their practical power rests on their national sincerity. 



92' ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Veracity derives from instinct, and marks superiority in 
organization. Nature has endowed some animals with 
cunning, as a compensation for strength withheld ; but 
it has provoked the malice of all others, as if avengers of 
public wrong. In the nobler kinds, where strength could 
be afforded, her races are loyal to truth, as truth is the 
foundation of the social state. Beasts that make no 
truce with man, do not break faith with each other. 
'T is said, that the wolf, who makes a cache of his prey, 
and brings his fellows with him to the spot, if, on digging 
it is not found, is nistantly and unresistingly torn in pieces. 
English veracity seems to result on a sounder animal struc- 
ture, as if they could afford it. They are blunt in saying 
what they think, sparing of promises, and they require 
plain dealing of others. We will not have to do with 
a man in a mask. Let us know the truth. Draw a 
straight line, hit whom and where it ,will. Alfred, whom 
the affection of the nation makes the type of their race, is 
called by a writer at the Norman Conquest, the truth- 
speaker ; Alueredus veridicus. Geoffrey of Monmouth 
says of King Aurelius, uncle of Arthur, that " above all 
things he hated a lie." The Northman Guttorm said to 
King Olaf, "It is royal w^ork to fulfil royal words." 
Tiie mottoes of their families are monitory proverbs, as, 
Farefac, — Say, do, — of the Fairfaxes ; Sai/ and seal, of 
the house of Fiennes ; Vero nil veriiis, of the De Veres. 
To be king of their word, is their pride. When they un- 
mask cant, they say, " The English of this is," etc. ; and 
to give the lie is the extreme insult. The phrase of the 
lowest of the people is "honor-bright," and their vulgar 
praise, " his word is as good as his bond." They hate 



TRUTH. 93 

shuffling and equivocation, and the canse is damaged in 
the public opinion, on which any paltering can be fixed. 
Even Lord Chesterfield, with his French breeding, when 
he came to define a gentleman, declared that truth made 
his distinction ; and nothing ever spoken by him would 
find so hearty a suffrage from his nation. The Duke of 
Wellington, who had the best right to say so, advises the 
French General Kellermann, that he may rely on the pa- 
role of an English officer. The English, of all classes, 
value themselves on this trait, as distinguishing them 
from the French, who, in the popular belief, are more 
polite than true. An Englishman understates, avoids the 
superlative, checks himself in compliments, alleging, that 
in the French language, one cannot speak without lying. 

They love reality in wealth, power, hospitality, and do 
not easily learn to make a show, and take the world as 
it goes. They are not fond of ornaments, and if they 
wear them, they must be gems. They read gladly in old 
Fuller, that a lady, in the reign of Elizabeth, "would 
have as patiently digested a lie, as the wearing of false 
stones or pendants of counterfeit pearl." They have the 
earth-hunger, or preference for property in land, which 
is said to mark the Teutonic nations. They build of 
stone; public and private buildings are massive and 
durable. In comparing their ships' bouses, and public 
offices with the American, it is commonly said, that they 
spend a pound, where we spend a dollar. Plain rich 
clothes, plahi rich equipage, plain rich finish throughout 
their house and belongings, mark the English truth. 

They confide in each other, — English believes iu Eng- 
lish. The French feel the superiority of this probity. 



94 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

The Englishman is not springing a trap for his admira- 
tion, but is honestly minding his business. The french- 
man is vain. Madame de Stael says, that the English 
irritated Napoleon, mainly, because they have found out 
how to unite success with honesty. She was not aware 
how wide an application her foreign readers would give 
to the remark. Wellington discovered the ruin of Bona- 
parte's affairs, by his own probity. He augured ill of the 
empire, as soon as he saw that it was mendacious, and 
lived by war. If war do not bring in its sequel new 
trade, better agriculture and manufactures, but only 
games, fireworks, and spectacles, — no prosperity could 
support it; much less, a nation decimated for conscripts, 
and out of pocket, like France. So he drudged for years 
on his military works at Lisbon, £(nd from this base at last 
extended his gigantic lines to Waterloo, believing in his 
countrymen and their syllogisms above all the rhodomon- 
tade of Europe. 

At a St. George's festival, in Montreal, where I hap- 
pened to be a guest, since my return home, I observed 
that the chairman complimented his compatriots, by say- 
ing, " they confided that wherever they met an English- 
man, they found a man who would speak the truth." 
And one cannot think this festival fruitless, if, all over 
the world, on the 23d of April, wherever two or three 
English are found, they meet to encourage each other in 
the nationality of veracity. 

In the power of saying rude truth, sometimes in the 
lion's mouth, no men surpass them. On the king's birtli- 
day, when each bishop was expected to offer the king a 
purse of gold, Latimer 'gave Henry YIIL a copy of the 



TRUTH. 95 

Vulgate, with a mark at the passage, "Whoremongers 
and adulterers God will judge " ; and they so honor 
stoutness in each other, that the king passed it over. 
Tliej are tenacious of their belief, and cannot easily 
change their opinions to suit the hour. They are like 
ships with too much head on to come quickly about, nor 
will prosperity or even adversity be allowed to shake 
their habitual view of conduct. Whilst I was in Lon- 
don, M. Guizot arrived there on his escape from Paris, 
in February, 1848. Many private friends called on him. 
His name was immediately proposed as an honorary 
member to the Athenaeum. M. Guizot was blackballed. 
Certainly, they knew the distinction of his name. But 
the Englishman is not fickle. He had really made up his 
mind, now for years as he read his newspaper, to hate 
and despise M. Guizot ; and the altered position of the 
man as an illustrious exile, and a guest in the country, 
makes no diiference to him, as it would instantly, to an 
American. 

They require the same adherence, thorough conviction 
and reality in public men. It is the want of character 
which makes the low reputation of the Irish members. 
*•' See them," they said, " one hundred and twenty-seven 
all voting like sheep, never proposing anything, and all 
but four voting the income tax," — which was an ill- 
judged concession of the government, relieving Irish 
property from the burdens charged on English. 

They have a horror of adventurers in or out of Parlia- 
ment. The ruling passion of Englishmen, in these days, 
is a terror of humbug. In the same proportion, they 
value honesty, stoutness, and adherence to your own. 



96 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Tliey like a man committed fo his objects, Tliey hate 
the French, as frivolous ; they hate the Irish, as aimless ; 
they hate the Germans, as professors. In February, 
1848, tliey said, Look, the French king- and his party 
fell for want of a shot; they had not conscience to shoot, 
so entirely was the pith and heart of monarchy eaten out. 

They attack their own politicians every day, on the 
same grounds, as adventurers. They love stoutness in 
standing for your right, in declining money or promotion 
that costs any concession. Tiie barrister refuses the silk 
gown of Queen's Counsel, if his junior have it one day 
earlier. Lord Collingwood would not accept his medal 
for victory on 14th February, 1797, if he did not receive 
one for victory on 1st June, 1794 ; and the long-with- 
holden medal was accorded. When Castlereagh dis- 
suaded Lord Wellington from going to the king's levee, 
until the unpopular Cintra business had been explained, 
he replied : " You furnish me a reason for going. I will 
go to this, or I will never go to a king's levee." The 
radical mob at Oxford cried after the tory Lord Eldon, 
"There's old Eldon; cheer him; he never ratted." 
They have given the parliamentary nickname of Trimmers 
to the time-servers, whom English character does not 
love.* 

They are very liable in their politics to extraordinary 
delusions, thus, to believe what stands recorded in the 

* It is an unlucky moment to remember these spaikles of 
solitary virtue in the face of the honors lately paid in England 
to the Emperor Louis Napoleon. I am sure that no English- 
man whom I had the happiness to know, consented, when the 
aristocracy and the commons of London cringed like a Neapoli- 



TRUTH. 97 

gravest books, that tlie movement of lOtli April, 18^8, 
was urged or assisted by foreigners : wliich, to be sure, 
is paralleled by the democratic whimsey in this country, 
which I have noticed to be shared by men sane on other 
points, that the English are at the bottom of the agita- 
tion of slavery, in American pohtics : and then again to 
the Ereuch popular legends on the subject of perjidious 
Albion. But suspicion will make fools of nations as of 
citizens, 

A slow temperament makes them less rapid and ready 
than other countrymen, and has given occasion to the 
observation that English wit comes afterwards, — which 
the French denote as esprit d'escalier. This dulness 
makes their attachment to home, and their adherence in 
all foreign countries to home habits. The Englishman 
who visits Mount Etna will carry his teakettle to the 
top. The old Italian author of the " Relation of Eng- 
land " (in 1500) says : " I have it on the best informa- 
tion, that, when the war is actually raging most furiously, 
they will seek for good eating, and all their other com- 
forts, without thinking what harm might befall them." 
Then their eyes seem to be set at the bottom of a tunnel, 
and they affirm the one small fact they know, with the 
best faith in the world that nothing else exists. And, 
as their own belief in guineas is perfect, they readily, on 
all occasions, apply the pecuniary argument as final. 
Thus when the Kochester rappings began to be heard of 

tan rabble, before a successful thief. But — how to resist one 
step, though odious, in a linked series of state necessities ? — 
Governments must always learn too late, that the use of dis- 
honest agents is as ruinous for nations as for single men. 
5 G 



98 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

ill England, a man deposited £100 in a sealed box in tlie 
Dublin Bank, and. then advertised in the newspapers to 
all somnambulists, mesmerizers, and others, that whoever 
could tell him the number of his note should have the 
money. He let it lie there six months, the newspapers 
now and then, at his instance, stimulating the attention 
of the adepts ; but none could ever tell him ; and he 
said, " Now let me never be bothered more with this 
proven lie." It is told of a good Sir John, that he heard 
a case stated by counsel, and made up his mind ; then 
the counsel for the other side taking their turn to speak, 
he found himself so unsettled and perplexed, that he 
exclaimed, " So help me God ! I will never listen to 
evidence again," Any number of delightful examples of 
this English stolidity are the anecdotes of Europe. I 
knew a very w'orthy man, — a magistrate, I believe he was, 
in the town of Derby, — who went to the opera, to see 
Malibran. In one scene, the heroine was to rush across 
a ruined bridge. Mr. B. arose, and mildly yet firmly 
called the attention of the audience and the performers 
to the fact that, in his judgment, the bridge was unsafe ! 
This English stolidity contrasts with Erench wit and 
tact. The Erench, it is commonly said, have greatly 
more influence in Europe than the English. What in- 
fluence the English have is by brute force of wealth an-d 
power; that of the Erench by affinity and talent. The 
Italian is subtle, the Spaniard treacherous : tortures, it 
was said, could never wrest from an Egyptian the confes- 
sion of a secret. None of these trails belong to the 
Englishman. His choler and conceit force everything 
out. Defoe, who knew his countrymen well, says of 
them : — 



CilAllACTER. 99 

'In close intrigue, their fiicnlty 's but weak. 
For generally whate'er they know, they speak. 
And often their own counsels undermine 
Ey mere infirmity without design ; 
From whence, the learned say, it doth proceed. 
That English treasons never can succeed ; 
For they 're so open-hearted, you may know 
Their own most secret thoughts, and others' too." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CHARACTER. 

The English race are reputed morose. I do not 
know that they have sadder brows than their neighbors 
of northern climates. They are sad by comparison with 
the singing and dancing nations : not sadder, but slow 
and staid, as finding their joys at home. They, too, 
believe that where there is no enjoyment of life, there 
can be no vigor and art in speech or thought ; that your 
merry heart goes all the way, your sad one tires in a 
mile. This trait of gloom has been fixed on them by 
French travellers, who, from Froissart, Voltaire, Le Sage, 
Mirabeau, down to the lively journalists of iXxefeuilletons, 
have spent their wit on the solemnity of their neighbors. 
The French say, gay conversation is unknown in their 
island : the Englishman finds no relief from reflection 
except in reflection : when he wishes for amusement, he 
goes to work : his hilarity is like an attack of fever. 
Religion, the theatre, and the reading the books of his 
country, all feed and increase his natural melancholy. 



100 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

The police does not interfere with public diversions. It 
thinks itself bound in duty to respect the pleasures and 
rare gayety of this inconsolable nation ; and their well- 
known courage is entirely attributable to their disgust 
of life. 

I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few 
words have obtained this reputation. As compared with 
the Americans, I think them cheerful and contented. 
Young people, in our country, are much more prone to 
melancholy. The English have a mild aspect, and a 
ringing, cheerful voice. They are large-natured, and not 
so easily amused as the southerners, and are among them 
as grown people among children, requiring war, or trade, 
or engineering, or science, instead of frivolous games. 
They are proud and private, and, even if disposed to 
recreation, will avoid an open garden. They sported 
sadly ; ils s* amusaient tristement, selon la coutiime de leur 
pai/s, said Froissart ; and, 1 suppose, never nation built 
their party walls so thick, or their garden fences so high. 
Meat and wine produce no effect on them : they are just 
as cold, quiet, and composed, at the end, as at the begin- 
ning of dinner. 

The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six 
or seven hundred years ; and a kind of pride in bad 
public speaking is noted in the House of Commons, as 
if tliey were willing to show that they did not live by 
their tongues, or thought they spoke well enough if they 
liad the tone of gentlemen. In mixed company, they 
shut their mouths. A Yorkshire mill-owner told me, he 
had ridden more than once all the way from London to 
Leeds, in the first-class carriage, with the same persons, 



CHARACTER. 101 

and no word exclianged. The club-houses were estab- 
lished to cultivate social habits, and it is rare that more 
than two eat together, and oftenest one eats alone. Was 
it then a stroke of humor in the serious Swedenborg, or 
was it only his pitiless logic, that made him shut up the 
English souls in a heaven by themselves ? 

They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic, 
and stubborn, — and as mild, sweet, and sensible. The 
truth is, they have great range and variety of character. 
Commerce sends abroad multitudes of different classes. 
The choleric Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resi- 
dent in the East or West Indies, are wide of the perfect 
behavior of the educated and dignified man of family. So 
is the burly farmer ; so is the country 'squire, with his 
narrow and violent life. In every inn, is the Commer- 
cial-Room, in which * travellers,' or bagmen who carry 
patterns, and solicit orders, for the manufacturers, are 
wont to be entertained. It easily happens that this class 
should characterize England to the foreigner, who meets 
tliem on the road, and at every public house, whilst the 
gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude themselves whilst 
in them. 

But these classes are the right English stock, and may 
fairly show the national qualities, before yet art and edu- 
cation have dealt with them. They are good lovers, 
good haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and, in all 
tilings, very much steeped in their temperament, like 
men hardly awaked from deep sleep, which they enjoy. 
Their habits and instincts cleave to nature. They are of 
the earth, earthy ; and of the sea, as the sea-kinds, at- 
tached to it for what it yields them, and not from any 



102 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

seutiment. They are full of coarse strength, rude exer- 
cise, butcher's meat, and sound sleep ; and suspect any 
poetic insinuation or any hint for the conduct of life 
which reflects on this animal existence, as if somebody 
were fumblhig at the umbilical ccrd and might stop their 
supplies. They doubt a man's sound judgment, if he 
does not eat with appetite, and shake their heads if he is 
particularly chaste. Take them as they come, you shall 
find in the connnon people a surly indifference, sometimes 
gruffness and ill temper ; and, in minds of more power, 
magazines of inexhaustible war, challenging 

" The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring 
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland," 

They are headstrong believers and defenders of their 
opinion, and not less resolute in maintaining their whim 
and perversity. Hezekiah Woodward wrote a book 
against the Lord's Prayer. And one can believe that 
Burton the Anatomist of Melancholy, having predicted 
from the stars the hour of his death, slipped the knot 
himself round his own neck, not to falsify his horoscope. 
Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness ; they have 
extreme difficulty to run away, and will die game. Wel- 
lington said of the young coxcombs of the Life-Guards 
delicately brought up, " But the puppies fight well " ; 
and Nelson said of his sailors, " They really mind shot 
no more than peas." Of absolute stoutness no nation 
has more or better examples. They are good at storm- 
ing redoubts, at boarding frigates, at dying in the last 
ditch, or any desperate service which has daylight and 
honor in it : but not, I think, at enduring the rack, or any 



CHARACTER. 103 

passive obedience, like jumping off a castle-roof at the 
word of a czar. Being both vascular and highly organ- 
ized, so as to be very sensible of pain ; and intellectual, 
so as to see reason and glory in a matter. 

Of that constitutional force, which yields the supplies 
of the day, they have the more than enough, the excess 
which creates courage on fortitude, genius in poetry, in- 
vention in mechanics, enterprise in trade, magnificence 
in wealth, splendor in ceremonies, petulance and projects 
in youth. The young men have a rude health which 
runs into peccant humors. They drink brandy like water, 
cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on 
riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into 
absurd frolics with the gravity of the Eumenides. They 
stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their 
turbulent sense ; leaving no lie uncontradicted, no pre- 
tension unexamined. They chew hasheesh ; cut them- 
selves with poisoned creases ; swing their hammock in 
the boughs of the Bohon Upas ; taste every poison ; buy 
every secret ; at Naples, they put St. Jauuarius's blood 
in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the 
" winking Virgin," to know why she winks ; measure 
with an English foot-rule every cell of the Inquisition, 
every Turkish caaba, every Holy of holies ; translate and 
send to Bentley the arcanum bribed and bullied away from 
shuddering Bramins ; and measure their own strength by 
the terror they cause. These travellers are of every class, 
the best and the Avorst ; and it may easily happen that 
those of rudest behavior are taken notice of and remem- 
bered. The Saxon melancholy in the vulgar rich and 
poor appears as gushes of ill-humor, which every check 



104 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. There are 
multitudes of rude young English who have the self-suffi- 
ciency and bluutness of their nation, and who, with their 
disdain of the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion 
and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for 
uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad de- 
scription of the Briton generically, wliat was said two 
Imndred years ago, of one particular Oxford scholar: 
" He was a very bold man, uttered anything that came 
into his mind, not only among liis companions, but in 
public coffee-houses, and would often speak his mind of 
particular persons then accidentally present, without 
examining the company he was in ; for which he was 
often reprimanded, and several times threatened to be 
kicked and beaten." 

The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal 
article in the bill of social rights, that every man has a 
right to his own ears. No man can claim to usurp more 
than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room, 
or to put upon the company the loud statements of his 
crotchets or personalities. 

But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes 
of nations are written, and however derived, w^iether a 
happier tribe or mixture of tribes, the air, or what cir- 
cumstance, that mixed for them the golden mean of tem- 
perament, — here exists the best stock in the world, 
broad-fronted, broad-bottomed, best for depth, range, 
and equability, men of aplomb and reserves, great range 
and many moods, strong instincts, yet apt for culture ; 
war-class as well as clerks ; earls and tradesmen ; wise 
minority, as well as foolish majority ; abysmal tempera- 



CHARACTER. 105 

ment, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on which no 
sunshine settles; alternated with a common-sense and 
humanity which hold them fast to every piece of cheerful 
duty ; making this temperament a sea to which all storms 
are superficial ; a race to which their fortunes flow, as if 
they alone had the elastic organization at once fine and 
robust enough for dominion; as if the burly, inexpres- 
sive, now mute and contumacious, now fierce and sharp- 
tongued dragon, Avhich once made the island light with 
his fiery breatii, had bequeathed his ferocity to his con- 
queror. They hide virtues under vices, or the semblance 
of them. It is the misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll 
again, who lifts the cart out of the mire, or " threshes 
the corn that ten day-laborers could not end," but it is 
done in the dark, and with muttered maledictions. He 
is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose speech is 
a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help you at a 
pinch. He says no, but serves you, and your thanks 
disgust him. Here was lately a cross-grained miser, odd 
and ugly, resembling in 'countenance the portrait of 
Punch, with the laugh left out ; rich by his own indus- 
try ; sulking in a lonely house ; who never gave a dinner 
to any man, and disdained all courtesies ; yet as true a 
worshipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed, 
and profusely pouring over the cold mind of his country- 
men creations of grace and truth, removing the reproach 
of sterility from English art, catching from their savage 
climate every fine hint, and importing into their galleries 
every tint and trait of sunnier cities and skies ; making 
an era in painting ; and, when he saw that the splendor 
of one of his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his 
5* 



106 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

rival's that Imng next it, secretly took a brusli and black- 
ened his own. 

They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws 
to peck at. They have that phlegm or staidness, which 
it is a compliment to disturb. " Great men," said Aris- 
totle, "are always of a nature originally melancholy." 
'T is the liabit of a mind which attaches to abstractions 
with a passion which gives vast results. They dare to 
displease, they do not speak to expectation. They like 
the sayers of No, better tlian the sayers of Yes. Eacli 
of tiiem has an opinion which lie feels it becomes him to 
express all the more that it differs from yours. They are 
meditating opposition. This gravity is inseparable from 
minds of great resources. 

There is an English hero superior to the French, tlie 
German, the Italian, or the Greek. When he is brought 
to the strife with fate, he sacrifices a richer material pos- 
session, and on more purely metaphysical grounds. He 
is there with his own consent, face to face with fortune, 
which he defies. On deliberate choice, and from grounds 
of character, he has elected his part to live and die for, 
and dies with grandeur. This race has added new ele- 
ments to humanity, and has a deeper root in the world. 

They have great range of scale, from ferocity to 
exquisite refinement. With larger scale, they have great 
retrieving power. After running each tendency to an 
extreme, they try another tack with equal heat. More 
intellectual than other races, when they live with other 
races, they do not take their language, but bestow their 
own. They subsidize other nations, and are not sub- 
sidized. They proselyte, and are not proselyted. They 



CHARACTER. 107 

assimilate otlier races to themselves, and are not assim- 
ilated. The English did not calculate the conquest of 
the Indies. It fell to their character. So they admin- 
ister in different parts of the world, the codes of every 
empire and race : in Canada, old Erench law ; in the 
Mauritius, the Code Napoleon ; in the West Indies, the 
edicts of the Spanish Cortes ; in the East Indies, the Laws 
of Menu ; in the Isle of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing ; 
at the Cape of Good Hope, of the Old Netherlands ; and 
in the Ionian Islands, the Pandects of Justinian. 

They are very conscious of their advantageous position 
in history. England is the lawgiver, the patron, tlie 
instructor, the ally. Compare the tone of the French 
and of the EngUsh press : the first querulous, captious, 
sensitive, about Enghsh opinion; the English press is 
never timorous about French opinion, but arrogant and 
contemptuous. 

They are testy and headstrong through an excess of 
will and bias ; churlish as men sometimes please to be 
who do not forget a debt, who ask no favors, and wlio 
will do what they like with their own. With education 
and intercourse these asperities wear off, and leave the 
good-will pure. If anatomy is reformed according to 
national tendencies, I suppose, the spleen will hereafter 
be found in the Englishman, not found in the American, 
and differencing the one from the other. I anticipate 
another anatomical discovery, that this organ will be 
found to be cortical and caducous, that they are superfi- 
cially morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein differ- 
ing from Rome and the Latin nations. Nothing savage, 
nothing mean resides in the English heart. They are 



108 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

subject to panics of credulity and of rag'e, but the tem- 
per of the nation, however disturbed, settles itself soon 
and easily, as, in this temperate zone, the sky after what- 
ever storms clears again, and serenity is its normal con- 
dition. 

A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception 
as the curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Amer- 
icans, when they first deal witli English, pronounce them 
stupid ; but, later, do them justice as people who wear 
well, or hide their strength. To understand the power 
of performance that is m their finest wits, in the patient 
Newton, or in the versatile transcendent poets, or in the 
Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams, Eldons, and Peels, one 
should see how English day-laborers hold out. High 
and low, they are of an unctuous texture. There is an 
adipocere in their constitution, as if they had oil also for 
their mental wheels, and could perform vast amounts of 
work without damaging themselves. 

Even the scale of expense on which people live, and 
to which scholars and professional men conform, proves 
the tension of their muscle, when vast numbers are 
found who can each lift this enormous load. I might 
even add, their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of 
body. 

No nation was ever so rich in able men : " Gentle- 
men," as Charles I. said of Strafford, " wliose abilities 
might make a prince rather afraid than ashamed in the 
greatest affairs of state " : men of such temper, that, 
like Baron Vere, " had one seen him returning from a 
victory, he would by his silence have suspected tliat he 
had lost the day ; and, had he beheld him in a retreat. 



CHARACTER. 109 

lie would have collected liim a conqueror by tlie cheer- 
fulness of his spirit." * 

The following passage from the Heimskriugla might 
almost stand as a portrait of the modern Englishman : 
"Haldor was very stout and strong, and remarkably 
handsome in appearances. King Harold gave him this 
testimony, that he, among all his men, cared least about 
doubtful circumstances, whether they betokened danger 
or pleasure ; for, whatever turned up, lie was never in 
higher nor in lower spirits, never slept less nor more on 
account of them, nor ate nor drank but according to Lis 
custom. Haldor was not a man of many words, but 
short in conversation, told his opinion bluntly, and was 
obstinate and hard ; and this could not please the king, 
who had many clever people about him, zealous in his 
service. Haldor remained a short time with the king, 
and then came to Iceland, where he took up his abode in 
Hiardaholt, and dwelt in that farm to a very advanced 
age."t 

The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy 
or whiffling. The slow, deep, English mass smoulders 
with fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame. The 
wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a long 
memory, and, in its hottest heat, a register and rule. 

Half their strength they put not forth. They are 
capable of a sublime resolution, and if hereafter the war 
of races, often predicted, and making itself a war of 
opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty com- 
ing from Eastern Europe), should menace the English 

* Fuller. Worthies of England. 

t Heimskringla, Laing's translation, Vol. III. p. 37. 



110 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their 
floating castles, and find a new home and a second millen- 
nium of power in tiieir colonies. 

The stability of England is the security of the modern 
world. If the English race were as mutable as the 
French, what reliance ? But the English stand for lib- 
erty. The conservative, money-loving, lord-loving Eng- 
lish are yet liberty -loving ; and so freedom is safe : for 
they have more personal force than other people. Tiie 
nation always resist the immoral action of their govern- 
ment. They think humanely on tlie affairs of France, of 
Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig Holstein, 
though overborne by the statecraft of the rulers at last. 

Does the early history of each tribe show the perma- 
nent bias, which, though not less potent, is masked, as 
the tribe spreads its activity into colonies, commerce, 
codes, arts, letters ? The early history shows it, as the 
musician plays the air which he proceeds to conceal in 
a tempest of variations. In Alfred, in the Northmen, 
one may read the genius of tiie English society, namely, 
that private life is the place of honor. Glory, a career, 
and ambition, words famihar to the longitude of Paris, 
are seldom heard in English speech. Nelson wrote from 
their hearts his homely telegraph, ''England expects 
every man to do his duty." 

Eor actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or 
to appease diseased or inflamed talent, the army and navy 
may be entered (the worst boys doing well in the navy) ; 
and the civil service, in departments where serious 
official work is done ; and they hold in esteem the bar- 
rister engaged in the severer studies of the law. But 



COCKAYNE. Ill 

the calm, sound, and most Britisli Briton shrinks froni 
public life, as charlatanism, and respects an economy 
founded, on agriculture, coal-mines, manufactures, or 
trade, which secures an independence through the crea- 
tion of real values. 

They wish neither to command or obey, but to be 
kings in their own houses. They are intellectual and 
deeply enjoy literature ; they like well to have the world 
served up to them in books, maps, models, and every 
mode of exact information, and, though not creators in 
the art, they value its refinement. Tliey are ready for 
leisure, can direct and fill their own day, nor need so 
much as others the constraint of a necessity. But tlie 
history of the nation discloses, at every turn, this origi- 
nal predilection for private independence, and, however 
this inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes 
with which their vast colonial power has warped men out 
of orbit, the inclination endures, and forms and reforms 
the laws, letters, manners, and occupations. They choose 
that welfare which is compatible with the commonwealth, 
knowing that such alone is stable; as wise merchants 
prefer investments in three per cents. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

COCKAYNE. 

The English are a nation of humorists. Individual 
right is pushed to the uttermost bound compatible with 
public order. Property is so perfect, that it seems the 



11^ ENGLISH TRAITS. 

craft of tliat race, and not to exist elsewhere. The king 
cannot step on an acre whicli the peasant refuses to sell. 
A testator endows a dog or a rookery, and Europe can- 
not interfere Avith his absurdity. Every individual has 
his particular way of living, which he puslies to folly, and 
the decided sympathy of his compatriots is engaged to 
back up Mr. Crump's whim by statutes, and chancellors, 
and horse-guards. Tliere is no freak so ridiculous but 
some Englishman has attempted to immortalize by money 
and law. Britisli citizenship is as omnipotent as Roman 
was. Mr. Cockayne is very sensible of this. The pursy 
man means by freedom the right to do as he pleases, 
and does wrong in order to feel his freedom, and makes 
a conscience of persisting in it. 

He is intensely patriotic, for his country is so small. 
His confidence in the power and performance of his 
nation makes him provokingly incurious about other na- 
tions. He dislikes foreigners. Swedenborg, who lived 
much in England, notes " the similitude of minds among 
the English, in consequence of wliich they contract famil- 
iarity with friends who are of that nation, and seldom 
witli others ; and they regard foreigners, as one looking 
through a telescope from the top of a palace regards 
those who dwell or wander about out of the city." A 
much older traveller, the Venetian who wrote the " Rela- 
tion of England," * in 1500, says : " The English are 
great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging 
to them. They think that there are no other men than 
themselves, and no other world but England ; and, when- 
ever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that he 

* Printed by the Camden Society. 



COCKAYNE. 113 

looks like au Englishman, and it is a great pity lie should 
not be an Englishman ; and whenever they partake of 
any delicacy with a foreigner, they ask him whether such 
a thing is made in his country." When he adds epithets 
of praise, his climax is " so English " ; and when he 
wishes to pay you the highest compliment, he says, I 
should not know you from au Englishman. France is, 
by its natural contrast, a kind of blackboard on which 
English character draws its own traits in chalk. This 
arrogance habitually exhibits itself in allusions to the 
French. *I suppose that all men of English blood in 
America, Europe, or Asia have a secret feeling of joy 
tliat they are not French natives. Mr. Coleridge is said 
to have given public thanks to God, at the close of a 
lecture, that he had defended him from being able to 
utter a single sentence in the French language. I have 
found that Englishmen have such a good opinion of 
England, that the ordinary phrases, in all good society, 
of postponing or disparaging one's own things in talking 
with a stranger, are seriously mistaken by them for an 
insuppressible homage to the merits of their nation ; and 
the New-Yorker or Pennsylvanian who modestly laments 
the disadvantage of a new country, log-huts, and savages, 
is surprised by the instant and. unfeigned commiseration 
of the whole company, who plainly account all the world 
out of England a heap of rubbish. 

Tlie same insular limitation pinches his foreign poli- 
tics. He sticks to his traditions and usages, and, so 
help him God ! he will force his island by-laws down the 
throat of great countries, like India, China, Canada, 
Australia, and not only so, but impose Wapping on the 



114 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Congress of Vienna, and trample down all nationalities 
with iiis taxed boots. Lord Chatham goes for liberty, 
and no taxation without representation; — for that is 
British law ; but not a hobnail shall they dare make in 
America, but buy their nails in England, — for that also 
is British law ; and the fact that British commerce was 
to be re-created by the independence of America, took 
them all by surprise. 

In short, I am afraid that English nature is so rank 
and aggressive as to be a little incompatible with every 
other. The world is not wide enough for two. 

But, beyond this nationality, it must be admitted, the 
island offers a daily worship to the old Norse god Brage, 
celebrated among onr Scandinavian forefathers, for his 
eloquence and majestic air. The English have a steady 
courage, that fits them for great attempts and endurance : 
they have also a petty courage, through which every man 
delights in showing himself for what he is, and in doing 
what he can ; so that, in all companies, each of them has 
too good an opinion of himself to imitate anybody. He 
hides no defect of his form, features, dress, connection, 
or birthplace, for he thinks every circumstance belonging 
to him comes recommended to you. If one of them 
have a bald, or a red, or a green head, or bow legs, or a 
scar, or mark, or a paunch, or a squeaking or a raven 
voice, he has persuaded himself that there is something 
modish and becoming in it, and that it sits well on him. 

But nature makes nothing hi vain, and this little su- 
perfluity of self-regard in the English brain is one of 
the secrets of their power and history. It sets every 
man on being and doing what he really is and can. It 



COCKAYNE. 115 

takes away a dodging, skulking, secondary air, and en- 
courages a frank and manly bearing, so that, each man 
makes the most of himself, and loses no opportunity for 
want of pushing. A man's personal defects will com- 
monly have with the rest of the world precisely that 
importance which they have to himself. If he makes 
light of them, so will other men. We all find in these a 
convenient meter of character, since a little man would 
be ruined by the vexation. I remember a shrewd poli- 
tician, in one of our Western cities, told me "that he had 
known several successful statesmen made by their foi- 
ble." And another, an ex-governor of Illinois, said to 
me : " If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner 
and be modest ; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that 
lie goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary 
discoveries." 

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker 
is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor 
him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to 
it. Their culture generally enables the travelled Englisli 
to avoid any ridiculous extremes of this self-pleasing, 
and to give it an agreeable air. Then the natural dis- 
position is fostered by the respect which they find enter- 
tained in the world for English ability. It was said of 
Louis XIV., that his gait and air were becoming enough 
in so great a monarch, yet would have been ridiculous in 
another man ; so the prestige of the English name war- 
rants a certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or 
Belgian could not carry. At all events, they feel them- 
selves at liberty to assume the most extraordinary tone 
on the subject of English merits. 



116 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

An English lady on the Rhine hearing a German 
speaking of her party as foreigners, exelainied, " No, we 
are not foreigners ; we are English : it is you that are 
foreigners." They tell you daily, in London, the story 
of the Frenchman and Englishman who quarrelled. 
Both were unwilling to fight, hut their companions put 
them up to it; at last, it was agreed, that they should 
fight alone, in the dark, and with pistols : the candles 
were put out, and the Englishman, to make sure not to 
hit anybody, fired up the chimney, and brought down tiie 
Erenchnian. They have no curiosity about foreigners, 
and answer any information you may volunteer, with 
" Oh ! Oh ! " until the informant makes up his mind, 
that they shall die in their ignorance, for any help he 
will offer. There are really no limits to this conceit, 
though brighter men among them make painful efforts to 
be candid. 

The habit of brag runs through all classes, from the 
Tiijies newspaper through politicians and poets, through 
Wordsworl h, Carlyle, Mill, and Sydney Smith, down to 
the boys of Eton. In the gravest treatise on political 
economy, in a philosophical essay, in books of science, one 
is surprised by the most innocent exhibition of unflinch- 
ing nationality. In a tract on Corn, a most amiable and 
accomplished gentleman writes thus : " Though Britain, 
according to Bishop Berkeley's idea, were surrounded by 
a wall of brass ten thousand cubits in height, still, she 
would as far excel the rest of the globe in riches, as she 
now does, both in this secondary quality, and in the 
more important ones of freedom, virtue, and science." * 

* William Spence. 



COCKAYNE. 117 

The English dislike the American structure of society, 
whilst yet trade, mills, public education, aud chartism 
are doing what they can to create in England the same 
social condition. America is the paradise of the econ- 
omists ; is the favorable exception invariably quoted to 
the rules of ruin; but when he speaks directly of the 
Americans, the islander forgets his philosophy, and re- 
members his disparaging anecdotes. 

But this childish patriotism costs something, like all 
narrowness. The English sway of their colonies has no 
root of kindness. They govern by their arts and ability ; 
they are more just than kind ; and, whenever an abate- 
ment of their power is felt, they have not conciliated the 
affection on which to rely. 

Coarse local distinctions, as those of nation, province, 
or town, are useful in the absence of real ones ; but we 
must not insist on these accidental lines. Individual 
traits are always triumphing over national ones. There 
is no fence in metaphysics discriminating Greek, or Eng- 
lish, or Spanish science, ^sop and Montaigne, Cervan- 
tes and Saadi, are men of the world ; and to wave our 
own flag at the dinner-table or in the University, is to 
carry the boisterous dulness of a fire-club into a polite 
circle. Nature and destiny are always on the watch for 
our follies. Nature trips us up when we strut ; and 
there are curious examples in history on this very point 
of national pride. 

George of Cappadocia, born at Epiphania in Cllicia, 
was a low parasite, who got a lucrative contract to 
supply the army with bacon. A rogue and informer, he 
got rich, and was forced to run from justice. He saved 



118 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

his money, embraced Arianism, collected a library, and 
got promoted by a faction to the episcopal throne of 
Alexandria. When Julian came, a. d. 3G1, George was 
dragged to prison; the prison was burst open by the 
mob, and George was lynched, as he deserved. And this 
precious knave became, in good time. Saint George of 
England, patron of chivalry, emblem of victory and civil- 
ity, and the pride of the best blood of the modern world. 
Strange, that the solid truth-speaking Briton should 
derive from an impostor. Strange, that the New World 
should have no better luck, — that broad America must 
wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle- 
dealer at Seville, who w^ent out, in 1499, a subaltern 
with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boat- 
swain's mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed 
in this lying world to supplant Columbus, and baptize 
half the earth with his own dishonest name. Thus no- 
body can throw stones. We ai-e equally badly off' in our 
h)unders ; and the false pickle-dealer is an offset to the 
false bacon-seller. 



CHAPTER X. 

WEALTH. 

There is no country in which so absolute a homage 
is paid to wealth. In America, there is a touch of shame 
when a man exhibits the evidences of large property, as 
if, after all, it needed apology. But the Englishman has 
pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. 
A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls ; — if 



WEALTH. 119 

you have merit, can you not sliow it by your good 
clothes, and coach, and horses ? How can a man be a 
gentleman without a pipe of wine ? Haydon says, 
" Tbere is a fierce resolution to make every man live 
according to the means he possesses," There is a mix- 
tare of religion in it. They are under the Jewish law, 
and read w^ith sonorous emphasis that their days shall be 
long in the land, they shall have sons and daughters, 
flocks and herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion is 
the reproach of poverty. They do not wish to be repre- 
sented except by opulent men. An Englishman who has 
lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart. 
Tlie last term of insult is, "a beggar." Nelson said, 
" The want of fortune is a crime which I can never get 
over." Sydney Smith said, "Poverty is infamous in 
Eugland." And one of their recent writers speaks, in 
reference to a private and scholastic hfe, of " the grave 
moral deterioration which follows an empty exchequer." 
You shall find this sentiment, if not so frankly put, yet 
deeply implied, in the novels and romances of the present 
century, and not only in these, but in biography, and in 
the votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the preach- 
ing, and in the table-talk. 

I was lately turning over Wood's Af hence Oxonienses, 
and looking naturally for another standard in a chronicle 
of the scholars of Oxford for two hundred years. But 
I found the two disgraces in that, as in most English 
books, are, first, disloyalty to Church and State, and, 
second, to be born poor, or to come to poverty. A natu- 
ral fruit of England is the brutal political economy. 
Malthus finds no cover laid at nature's table for the 



120 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

laborer's son. In 1809, the majority in Parliament 
expressed itself by tlie language of Mr. Fuller in the 
House of Commons, " If you do not like the country, 
damn you, you can leave it." When Sir S. Romilly 
proposed his bill forbidding parish officers to bind chil- 
dren apprentices at a greater distance than forty miles 
from their home, Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said, 
" though, in the higher ranks, to cultivate family affec- 
tions was a good thing, 't was not so among the lower 
oi-dcrs. Better take them away from tliose who might 
deprave them. And it was highly injurious to trade to 
stop binding to manufacturers, as it must raise the price 
of labor, and of manufactured goods." 

The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled 
only by the respect for wealth. It is at once the pride of 
art of the Saxon, as he is a wealth-maker, and his passion 
for independence. The Englishman believes that every 
man must take care of himself, and has himself to thank, 
if he do not mend his condition. To pay their debts is 
their national point of honor. From the Exchequer and 
the East India House to the huckster's shop, everything 
prospers, because it is solvent. The British annies are 
solvent, and pay for what they take. The British empire 
is solvent ; for, in spite of the huge national debt, the 
valuation mounts. During the war from 1789 to 1815, 
whilst they complained that they were taxed within an 
inch of their lives, and, by dint of enormous taxes, were 
subsidizing all the continent against France, the English 
were growing rich every year faster than any people ever 
grew before. It is their maxim, that the weight of taxes 
must be calculated, not by what is taken^ but by what is 



WEALTH. 121 

left. Solvency is in the ideas and mecLanism of an Eng- 
lishman. The Crystal Palace is n©t considered honest 
until it pays ; no matter how much convenience, beauty, 
or eclat, it must be self-supporting. They are contented 
with slower steamers, as long as they know that swifter 
boats lose money. They proceed logically by the double 
method of labor and thrift. Every household exhibits 
an exact economy, and nothing of that uncalculated 
headlong expenditure which families use in America. If 
they cannot pay, they do not buy ; for they have no pre- 
sumption of better fortunes next year, as our people 
have ; and they say without sliame, I cannot afford it. 
Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the second-class 
cars, or in the second cabin. An economist, or a man 
who can proportion his means and his ambition, or bring 
the year round with expenditure which expresses his 
character, without embarrassing one day of his future, is 
already a master of life, and a freeman. Lord Burleigh 
writes to his son, " that one ought never to devote more 
than two thirds of his income to the ordinary expenses of 
life, since the extraordinary will be certain to absorb the 
other third." 

The ambition to create value evokes every kind of 
ability, government becomes a manufjicturing corpora- 
tion, and every house a mill. The headlong bias to util- 
ity will let no talent lie in a napkin, — if possible, will 
teach spiders to weave silk stockings. An Englishman, 
while he eats and drinks no more, or not much more than 
another man, labors three times as many hours in the 
course of a year, as an other European ; or, his life as 
a workman is three lives. He works fast. Everytliing 
6 



I'ZZ ENGLISH TEAITS. 

in England is at a quick pace. They have reinforced 
their own productivity, by the creation of that marvel- 
lous machinery which differences this age from any other 
age. 

'T is a curious chapter in modern history, the growth 
of the machine-shop. Six hundred years ago, Roger 
Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes, the con- 
sequent necessity of the reform of the calendar; meas- 
ured the length of the year, invented gunpowder; and 
announced (as if looking from his lofty cell, over five cen- 
turies, into ours) " that machines can be constructed to 
drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers 
could do; nor would they need anything but a pilot 
to steer them. Carriages also might be constructed to 
move with an incredible speed, Avithout the aid of any 
animal. Finally, it would not be impossible to make 
machines, which, by means of a suit of wings, should fly 
in the air in the manner of birds." But the secret slept 
with Bacon. The six hundred years have not yet ful- 
filled his words. Two centuries ago, the sawing of tim- 
ber was done by hand ; the carriage-wheels ran on 
w^ooden axles ; the land was tilled by wooden ploughs. 
And it was to little purpose that they had pit-coal or that 
looms were improved, unless Watt and Stephenson had 
taught them to work force-pumps and poM^er-looms by 
steam. The great strides were all taken within the 
last hundred years. Tlie life of Sir Robert Peel, in 
his day the model Englishman, very properly has, for 
a frontispiece, a drawing of the spinning-jenny, which 
wove the web of his fortunes. Ilargreaves invented the 
spiiniing-jenny, and died in a workhouse. Arkwright 



WEALTH. 123 

improved the invention ; and the machine dispensed with 
the work of ninety-nine men : that is, one spinner could 
do as much work as one hundred had done before. The 
loom was improved further. But the men would some- 
times strike for wages, and combine against the masters, 
and, about 1829 - 30, much fear was felt, lest the trade 
would be drawn away by these interruptions, and the 
emigration of the spinners, to Belgium and the United 
States. Iron and steel are very obedient. Whether it 
were not possible to make a spinner that would not 
rebel, nor mutter, nor scowl, nor strike for wages, nor 
emigrate? At the solicitation of the masters, after a 
mob and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts of Manches- 
ter undertook to create this peaceful fellow, instead of 
the quarrelsome fellow God had made. After a few 
trials, he succeeded, and, in 1830, procured a patent for 
his self-acting mule ; a creation, the delight of mill-own- 
ers, and " destined," tliey said, " to restore order among 
the industrious classes " ; a machine requiring only a 
child's hand to piece the broken yarns. As Arkwright 
had destroyed domestic spinning, so Roberts destroyed 
tlie factory spinner. The power of machinery in Great 
Britain, in mills, has been computed to be equal to 
600,000,000 men, one man being able by the aid of steam 
to do the work which required two hundred and fifty men 
to accomplish fifty years ago. The production has been 
commensurate. England already had this laborious race, 
rich soil, water, wood, coal, iron, and favorable climate. 
Eight hundred years ago, commerce liad made it rich, and 
it was recorded, " England is the ricliest of all the north- 
ern nations." The Norman historians recite, that "in 



124 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

1067, William carried witli Lini into Normaudj, from 
England, more gold and silver than had ever before been 
seen in Gaul. But when, to this labor and trade and 
these native resources was added this goblin of steam, 
with his myriad arms, never tired, working night and 
day everlastingly, the amassing of property has run out 
of all figures. It makes the motor of the last ninety 
years. The steam-pipe has added to her population and 
wealth the equivalent of four or five Englands. Forty 
thousand ships are entered in Lloyd's lists. The yield 
of wheat has gone on from 2,000,000 quarters in the 
time of the Stuarts, to 13,000,000 in 1854. A thousand 
million pounds sterling are said to compose the float- 
ing money of commerce. In 1848, Lord John Russell 
stated that the people of this country had laid out 
£300,000,000 of capital in railways, in the last four 
years. But a better measure than these sounding fig- 
ures is the estimate, that there is wealth enough in 
England to support the entire population in idleness for 
one year. 

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels, 
roads, locomotives, telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar 
to a millionth of an inch. Steam twines huge cannon 
into wreaths, as easily as it braids straw, and vies with 
the volcanic forces which twisted the strata. It can 
clothe shingle mountains with ship-oaks, make sword- 
blades that will cut gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it 
can plant forests, and bring rain after three thousand 
years. Already it is ruddering the balloon, and the 
next war will be fought in the air. But another m^- 
clihie more potent in England than steam is the Bank. 



WEALTH. 125 

It votes an issue of bills, population is stimulated, and 
cities rise ; it refuses loans, and emigration empties the 
country ; trade sinks ; revolutions break out ; kings are 
dethroned. By these new agents our social system is 
moulded. By dint of steam and of money, war and com- 
merce are changed. Nations have lost their old omnip- 
otence ; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are 
getting obsolete, we go and live where we will. Steam 
lias enabled men to choose what law they will live under. 
Money makes place for them. The telegraph is a limp- 
band that will hold the Fenris-wolf of war. For now, 
that a telegraph line runs through France and Eu- 
rope, from London, every message it transmits makes 
stronger by one thread the band which war will have 
to cut. 

The introduction of these elements gives new resources 
to existing proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that 
the state depends on the House of Lords, but the en- 
gineer sees, that every stroke of the steam-piston gives 
value to the duke's land, fills it with tenants ; doubles, 
quadruples, centuples the duke's capital, and creates new 
measures and new necessities for the culture of his chil- 
dren. Of course, it draws the nobility into the compe- 
tition as stockholders in the mine, the canal, the railway, 
in the application of steam to agriculture, and sometimes 
into trade. But it also introduces large classes into the 
same competition; the old energy of the Norse race arms 
itself with these magnificent powers ; new men prove an 
overmatch for the land-owner, and the mill buys out the 
castle. Scandinavian Tlior, who once forged his bolts in 
icy Hecla, and built galleys by lonely fiords, in England, 



126 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

has advanced with the times, has shorn his beard, enters 
Parliament, sits down at a desk in the India House, and 
lends Miollnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer. 

The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety 
years is a main fact in modern history. The wealth of 
London determines prices all over the globe. All things 
precious, or useful, or amusing, or intoxicating, are 
sucked into this commerce and floated to London. Some 
English private fortunes reach, and some exceed, a mil- 
lion of dollars a year. A hundrad thousand palaces 
adorn the island. All that can feed the senses and pas- 
sions, all that can succor the talent, or arm the hands of 
the intelligent middle class who never spare in what they 
buy for their own consumption ; all that can aid sci- 
ence, gratify taste, or soothe comfort, is in open market. 
Whatever is excellent and beautiful in civil, rural, or ec- 
clesiastic architecture; in fountain, garden, or grounds; 
the English noble crosses sea and land to see and to copy 
at home. The taste and science of thirty peaceful gener- 
ations ; the gardens which Evelyn planted ; the temples 
and pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher 
Wren built; the wood that Gibbous carved; the taste 
of foreign and domestic artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown, 
Loudon, Paxton, are in the vast auction, and the heredi- 
tary principle heaps on the owner of to-day the benefit 
of ages of owners. The present possessors are to the 
full as absolute as any of their fathers, in choosing and 
procuring what they like. This comfort and splendor, 
the breadth of lake and mountain, tillage, pasture, and 
park, sumptuous castle and modern villa, — all consist 
with perfect order. They have no revolutions ; no horse- 



WEALTH. 127 

guards dictating to tlie crown ; no Parisian poissardes 
and barricades ; no mob ; but drowsy habitude, daily 
dress-dinners, wine, and ale, and beer, and gin, and. 
sleep. 

With this power of creation, and this passion for 
independence, property has reached an ideal perfection. 
It is felt and treated as the national life-blood. The 
laws are framed to give property the securest possible 
basis, and the provisions to lock and transmit it have 
exercised the cunuingest heads in a profession which 
never admits a fool. The riglits of property nothing but 
felony and treason can override. The house is a castle 
which the king cannot enter. The Bank is a strong-box 
to which the king has no key. Whatever surly sweet- 
ness possession can give, is tasted in England to the 
dregs. Vested rights are awful things, and absolute 
possession gives the smallest freeholder identity of inter- 
est with the duke. High stone fences and padlocked 
garden gates announce the absolute will of the owner to 
be alone. Every whim of exaggerated egotism is put 
into stone and iron, into silver and gold, with costly 
deliberation and detail. 

An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes 
to establish some claim to put her park paling a rod for- 
ward into his grounds, so as to get a coachway, and save 
her a mile to the avenue. Instantly he transforms his 
paling into stone masonry, solid as the walls of Cuma, 
and all Europe cannot prevail on him to sell or com- 
pound for an inch of the land. They delight in a freak 
as the proof of their sovereign freedom. Sir Edward 
Boynton, at Spic Park, at Cadenham, on a precipice of 



128 ENGLISH TUAITS. 

incomparable prospect, built a house like a long bam, 
which had not a window on the prospect side. Straw- 
berry Hill of Horace Walpole, Fonthill Abbey of Mr. 
Beckford, were freaks ; and Newstead Abbey became 
one in the hands of Lord Byron. 

But the proudest result of this creation lias been the 
great and refined forces it has put at the disposal of the 
private citizen. In the social world, an Englishman to- 
day has the best lot. He is a king in a plain coat. He 
goes with the most powerful protection, keeps the best 
company, is armed by the best education, is seconded by 
wealth ; and his English name and accidents are like 
a flourish of trumpets announcing him. This, with his 
quiet style of manners, gives him the power of a sov- 
ereign, without the inconveniences M'hich belong to that 
rank. I much prefer the condition of an English gen- 
tleman of the better class, to that of any potentate in 
Europe, — whether for travel, or for opportunity of 
society, or for access to means of science or study, or 
for mere comfort and easy healthy relation to people at 
home. 

Such, as we have seen, is the wealth of England, a 
mighty mass, and made good in whatever details we care 
to explore. The cause and spring of it is the wealth 
of temperament in the people. Tlie wonder of Britain 
is this plenteous nature. Her worthies are ever sur- 
rounded by as good men as themselves ; each is a 
captain a hundred strong, and that wealth of men is 
represented again in the faculty of each individual, — 
that he has waste strength, power to spare. The Eng- 
lish are so rich, and seem to have established a taproot 



WEALTH. 129 

in the bowels of the planet, because they are constitu- 
tionallj fertile and creative. 

But a man must keep an eye on liis servants, if he 
■would not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, 
and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his 
own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy 
in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in 
the work of the world. But it is found that the machine 
uimians the user. Wiuit he gains in making cloth, he 
loses in general power. There should be temperance 
in making cloth, as well as in eating. A man should 
not be a silkworm ; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars. 
The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the 
Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester spinner, 
— far on the way to be spiders and needles. The inces- 
sant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man, 
robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a 
pin-polisher, a buckle-maker, or any other specialty ; and 
presently, in a change of industry, whole towns are 
sacrificed like ant-hills, when the fashion of shoestrings 
supersedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen, 
or railways of turnpikes, or when commons are enclosed 
by landlords. Then society is admonished of the mis- 
chief of the division of labor, and that the best political 
economy is care and culture of men ; for, in these crises, 
all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, 
capable of thought, and of new choice and the applica- 
tion of their talent to new labor. Then again come in 
new calamities. England is aghast at the disclosure of her 
fraud in the adulteration of food, of drugs, and of almost 
every fabric in her mills and shops ; finding that milk will 
6* I 



130 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread satisfy, nor 
pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick. lu true England 
all is false and forged. This too is the reaction of nin- 
chiuery, but of the larger machinery of commerce. 'T is 
not, 1 suppose, want of probity, so much as the tyranny 
of trade, which necessitates a pei'petual competition of 
underselling, and that again a perpetual deterioration of 
the fabric. 

The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanage- 
able, and flies away with the aeronaut. Steam from the 
first hissed and screamed to M^arn him ; it was dreadful 
with its explosion, and crushed the engineer. The ma- 
chinist has wrought and watched, engineers and firemen 
without number have been sacrificed in learning to tame 
and guide the monster. But harder still it has proved 
to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper 
wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, 
and Bobinson, and their Parliaments, and their whole 
generation, adopted false principles, and went to their 
graves in the belief that they were enriching the country 
which they were impoverishing. They congratulated 
each other on ruinous expedients. It is rare to find 
a merchant who knows why a crisis occurs in trade, why 
prices rise or fall, or who knows the mischief of paper- 
money. In the culmination of national prosperity, in 
the annexation of countries ; building of ships, depots, 
towns ; in the influx of tons of gold and silver ; amid the 
chuckle of chancellors and financiers, it was found that 
bread rose to famine prices, that the yeoman was forced 
to sell his cow and pig, his tools, and his acre of land ; 
and the dreadful barometer of the poor-rates was touch- 



WEALTH. 131 

ing the point of ruin. The poor-rate was sucking in the 
solvent classes, and forcing an exodus of farmers and 
mechanics. What befalls from the violence of financial 
crises, befalls daily in the violence of artificial legislation. 

Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounte- 
ous, and augmenting. But the question recurs, does she 
take the step beyond, namely, to the wise use, in view 
of the supreme wealth of nations? We estimate the 
wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their 
surplus capital. And, in view of these injuries, some 
compensation has been attempted in England. A part 
of the money earned returns to the brain to buy schools, 
hbraries, bishops, astronomers, chemists, and artists with; 
and a part to repair the wrongs of this intemperate weav- 
ing, by hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics' Institutes, 
public grounds, and otlier charities and amenities. But 
the antidotes are frightfully inadequate, and the evil 
requires a deeper cure, which time and a simpler social 
organization must supply. At present, she does not rule 
her wealth. She is simply a good England, but no 
divinity, or wise and instructed soul. She too is in the 
stream of fate, one victim more in a common catastrophe. 

But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of 
greatness to be held as the chief offender. England must 
be held responsible for the despotism of expense. Her 
prosperity, the splendor which so much manhood and tal- 
ent and perseverance has thrown upon vulgar aims, is the 
very argument of materialism. Her success strengthens 
tlie hands of base wealth. Who can propose to youth 
poverty and wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the 



132 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

conquest of letters and arts ; when Eiiglisli success lias 
grown out of the very renunciation of principles, and the 
dedication to outsides. A civility of trifles, of money 
and expense, an erudition of sensation takes place, and 
the putting as many impediments as we can, between the 
man and his objects. Hardly the bravest among them 
have the manliness to resist it successfully. Hence, it 
has come, that not the aims of a manly life, but the 
means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is that 
which is to be considered by a youth in England, emer- 
ging from his minority. A large family is reckoned a 
misfortune. And it is a consolation in the death of the 
young, that a source of expense is closed. 

CHAPTER XI. 

AUISTOCRACY. 

The feudal character of the English state, now that it 
is getting obsolete, glares a little, in contrast with the 
democratic tendencies. The inequality of power and 
property shocks republican nerves. Palaces, halls, villas, 
walled parks, all over England, rival the splendor of 
royal seats. Many of tlie halls, like Haddon, or Kedles- 
ton, are beautiful desolations. The proprietor never saw 
them, or never lived in them. Primogeniture built these 
sumptuous piles, and, I suppose, it is the sentiment of 
every traveller, as it was mine, 'T was well to come ere 
these were gone. Primogeniture is a cardinal rule of 
English property and institutions. Laws, customs, man- 
ners, the very persons and faces, affirm it. 



ARISTOCRACY. 133 

The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of the 
people is loyal. The estates, names, and manners of 
the nobles flatter the fancy of the people, and conciliate 
the necessary support. In spite of broken faith, stolen 
charters, and the devastation of society by the profligacy 
of the court, we take sides as we read for the loyal 
England and King Charles's "return to his right" with 
his Cavaliers, — knowing what a heartless trifler he is, 
and what a crew of God-forsaken robbers they are. The 
people of England knew as much. But the fair idea of 
a settled government connecting itself with heraldic 
names, with the written and oral history of Europe, and, 
at last, with the Hebrew religion, and the oldest tradi- 
tions of the world, was too pleasing a vision to be shat- 
tered by a few offensive realities, and the politics of 
shoemakers and costermongers. The hopes of the com- 
moners take the same direction with the interest of the 
patricians. Every man who becomes rich buys land, and 
does what he can to fortify the nobility, into which he 
hopes to rise. The Anglican clergy -are identified with 
the aristocracy. Time and law have made the joining 
and moulding perfect in every part. The Cathedrals, 
the Universities, the national music, the popular ro- 
mances, conspire to uphold the heraldry, which the 
current poKtics of the day are sapping. The taste of 
the people is conservative. They are proud of the cas- 
tles, and of the language and symbol of chivalry. Even 
the word " lord " is the luckiest style that is used in 
any language to designate a patrician. The superior 
education and manners of the nobles recommend them 
to the country. 



134 ENGLISH THAITS. 

The Norwegian pirate got what he could, and held it 
for his eldest son. The Norman noble, who was the Nor- 
wegian pirate baptized, did likewise. Thece was this ad- 
vantage of Western over Oriental nobility, that this was 
recruited from below. English history is aristocracy 
with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let 
him come in. Of course, the terms of admission to this 
club are hard and high. The selfishness of the nobles 
comes in aid of the interest of the nation to require signal 
merit. Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics, and 
letters ; the war-lord to the law-lord ; the law-lord to the 
merchant and the mill-owner ; but the privilege was kept, 
whilst the means of obtaining it were changed. 

The foundations of these families lie deep in Norwegian 
exploits by sea, and Saxon sturdiness on land. All no- 
bility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superior- 
ity. The things these English have done were not done 
without peril of life, nor without wisdom and conduct ; 
and the first hands, it may be presumed, were often chal- 
lenged to show their right to their honors, or yield them 
to better men. " He that will be a head, let him be a 
bridge," said the Welsh chief Benegridran, when he car- 
ried all his men over the river on his back. " He shall 
have the book," said the mother of Alfred, "who can 
read it " ; and Alfred won it by that title : and I make 
no doubt that feudal tenure was no sinecure, but baron, 
knight, and tenant often had their memories refreshed, 
in regard to the service by which they held their lands. 
The De Veres, Bohuns, Mowbrays, and Plantagenets 
were not addicted to contemplation. The Middle Age 
adorned itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of 



ARISTOCRACY. 135 

Richard Beaiicljamp, Earl of Warwick, tlie Emperor told 
Henry V. that no Christian king had siicli another knig-ht 
for wisdom, nurture, and manliood, and caused him to be 
named, " Eatlier of curtesie." " Our success in France," 
saj's the historian, " lived and died with him." * 

Tlie war-lord earned his lionors, and no donation of 
land was large, as long as it brouglit the duty of protect- 
ing it, hour by hour, against a terrible enemy. In France 
and in England, the nobles were, down to a late day, born 
and bred to war ; and the duel, which in peace still held 
them to the risks of war, diminished the envy that, in 
trading and studious nations, would else have pried into 
their title. They were looked on as men who played high 
for a great stake. 

Great estates are not sinecures, if they are to be kept 
great. A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence. 
In the same line of Warwick, the successor next but one 
to Beauchamp was the stout earl of Henry VI. and 
Edward IV. Few esteemed themselves in the mode, 
whose heads were not adorned with the black ragged 
staff, his badge. At his house in London, six oxen were 
daily eaten at a breakfast ; and every tavern was full of 
his meat ; and who had any acquaintance in his family, 
should have as much boiled and roast as he could carry 
on a long dagger. 

The new age brings new qualities into request, the 
virtues of pirates gave way to those of planters, mer- 
chants, senators, and scholars. Comity, social talent, 
and fine manners, no doubt, have had their part also. I 
have met somewhere with a historiette, which, whether 

* Fuller's Worthies, II. p 472. 



136 ENGLISH TRAITS. ' 

more or less true in its particulars, carries a general truth. 
" How came the Duke of Bedford by his great landed 
estates ? His ancestor having travelled on the continent, 
a lively, pleasant man, became the companion of a foreign 
prince wrecked on the Dorsetshire coast, where Mr. 
Russell lived. The prince recommended him to Henry 
VIII., who, liking his company, gave him a large share 
of the plundered church lands." 

The pretence is that the noble is of unbroken descent 
from the Norman, and has never worked for eight hun- 
dred years. But the fact is otherwise. Where is Bohun ? 
where is De Vere? The lawyer, the farmer, the silk- 
mercer, lies i^erda under the coronet, and winks to the 
antiquary to say nothhig ; especially skilful lawyers, 
nobody's sons, who did some piece of work at a nice 
moment for government, and were rewarded with ermine. 

The national tastes of the English do not lead them 
to the life of the courtier, but to secure the comfort 
and independence of their homes. The aristocracy are 
marked by their predilection for country-life. They are 
called the county-families. They have often no residence 
in London, and only go thither for a short time, during 
the season, to see the opera ; but they concentrate the love 
and labor of many generations on the building, planting, 
and decoration of their homesteads. Some of them are 
too old and too proud to wear titles, or, as Sheridan said 
of Coke, " disdain to hide their head in a coronet " ; and 
some curious examples are cited to show the stability of 
English families. Their proverb is, that, fifty miles from 
London, a family will last a hundred years ; at a hundred 
miles, two hundred years ; and so on ; but I doubt that 



ARISTOCRACY. 137 

steam, the enemy of time, as well as of space, will dis- 
turb these ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton says of the 
first Duke of Buckingham : " He was born at Brookeby 
in Leicestershire, where his ancestors had chiefly contin- 
ued about the space of four hundred years, rather with- 
out obscurity, than with any great lustre." * Wraxall 
says, that, in 1781, Lord Surrey, afterwards Duke of 
Norfolk, told him, that when the year 1783 should arrive, 
he meant to give a grand festival to all the descendants 
of the body of Jockey of Norfolk, to mark the day when 
the dukedom should have remained three hundred years 
in their house, since its creation by Richard III. Pepys 
tells us, in writing of an Earl Oxford, in 1666, that the 
honor had now remained in that name and blood six hun- 
dred years. 

This long descent of families and this cleaving through 
ages to the same spot of ground captivates the imagina- 
tion. It has too a connection with the names of the 
towns and districts of the country. 

The names are excellent, — an atmosphere of legen- 
dary melody spread over the land. Older than all epics 
and histories, which clothe a nation, this undershirt sits 
close to the body. What history too, and what stores of 
primitive and savage observation, it infolds ! Cambridge 
is the bridge of the Cam ; Sheffield, the field of the river 
Sheaf; Leicester, the castra or camp of the Lear or Leir 
(now Soar) ; Rochdale, of the Roch ; Exeter or Excester, 
the castra of the Ex ; Exmouth, Dartmouth, Sidmouth, 
Teignmouth, the mouths of the Ex, Dart, Sid, and Teign 
Rivers. Waltham is strong town ; Radcliflfe is red cliff ; 

* Reliquiee Wottonianse, p. 208. 



138 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and so on ; — a sincerity and use in naming very striking 
to an American, wliose country is wliitewashed all over 
by unmeaning- names, the cast-ofF clothes of the country 
from which its emigrants came ; or, named at a pinch 
from a psalm-tune. But the English are those "barba- 
rians " of Jamblichus, who " are stable in their manners, 
and firmly continue to employ the same words, which also 
are dear to the gods." 

'T is an old sneer, that the Irish peerage drew their 
names from playbooks. The English lords do not call 
their lands after their own names, but call themselves 
after their lands ; as if the man represented the country 
that bred him ; and tliey rightly wear the token of the 
glebe that gave them birth; suggesting that the tie is not 
cut, but that there in London, — the crags of Argyle, the 
kail of Cornwall, the downs of Devon, the iron of Wales, 
the clays of Stafibrd, arc neitlier forgetting nor forgotten, 
but know the man who was born by them, and who, like 
the long line of his fathers, has carried that crag, that 
shore, dale, fen, or woodland in his blood and manners. 
It has, too, the advantage of suggesting responsibleness. 
A susceptible man could not wear a name which repre- 
sented in a strict sense a city or a county of England, 
without hearing in it a challenge to duty and honor. 

The predilection of the patricians for residence in the 
country, combined with tlie degree of liberty possessed 
by the peasant, makes the safety of the Enghsli hall. 
Mirabeau wrote prophetically from England, in 1784 : 
" If revolution break out in Erance, 1 tremble for the 
aristocracy : their chateaux will be reduced to ashes, and 
their blood spilt in torrents. The English tenant would 



ARISTOCRACY. lo9 

defend liis lord to the last extremity." Tlie English go 
to their estates for grandeur. The French live at court, 
and exile themselves to their estates for economy. As 
they do not mean to live with their tenants, they do not 
conciliate them, but wring from them the last sous. 
Evelyn writes from Blois, in 1644 : " The wolves are 
here in such numbers, that they often come and take 
children out of the streets; yet will not the Duke, who is 
sovereign here, permit them to be destroyed." 

In evidence of the wealth amassed by ancient families, 
the traveller is shown the palaces in Piccadilly, Burling- 
ton House, Devonshire House, Lansdowne House in 
Berkghire Square, and, lower down in the city, a few 
noble liouses which still withstaiKi in all their amplitude 
the encroachment of streets. The Duke of Bedford in- 
cludes or included a mile square in the heart of London, 
where the British Museum, once Montague House, now 
stands, and the land occupied by Woburn Square, Bed- 
ford Square, Russell Square. The Marquis of Westmin- 
ster built within a few years the series of squares called 
Belgravia. Stafford House is the noblest palace in Lon- 
don. Northumberland House holds its place by Charing 
Cross. Chesterfield House remains in Audley Street. 
Sion House and Holland House are in the suburbs. But 
most of the historical houses are masked or lost in the 
modern uses to which trade or charity has converted 
them. A multitude of town palaces contain inestimable 
galleries of art. 

Li the country, the size of private estates is more 
impressive. From Barnard Castle I rode on the high- 
way twenty-three miles from High Force, a fall of the 



140 ENGLISH TEAITS. 

TeeSj towards Darlington, past Raby Castle, flirougli 
tlie estate of the Duke of Cleveland. The Marquis of 
Breadalbane rides out of his house a hundred miles in 
a straight line to the sea, on his own property. The 
Duke of Sutherland owns the county of Sutherland, 
stretching across Scotland from sea to sea. The Duke 
of Devonshire, besides his other estates, owns 96,000 
acres in the county of Derby. The Duke of Richmond 
has 40,000 acres at Goodwood, and 300,000 at Gordon 
Castle. The Duke of Norfolk's park in Sussex is fifteen 
miles in circuit. An agriculturist bought lately the 
island of Lewes, in Hebrides, containing 500,000 acres. 
The possessions of the Earl of Lonsdale gave him eight 
seats in Parliament. This is the Heptarchy again ; and 
before the Reform of 1832, one hundred and fifty-four 
persons sent three hundred and seven members to Par- 
liament. The borough-mongers governed England. 

These large domains are growing larger. Tlie great 
estates are absorbing the small freeholds. In 1786, the 
soil of England was owned by 250,000 cor])orations and 
proprietors; and, in 1822, by 32,000. These broad 
estates find room in this narrow island. All over Eng- 
land, scattered at short intervals among ship-yards, mills, 
mines, and forges, are the paradises of the nobles, where 
the livelong repose and refinement are heightened by the 
contrast with the roar of industry and necessity, out of 
which yon have stepped aside. 

I was surprised to observe the very small attendance 
usually in the House of Lords. Out of 573 peers, on 
ordinary days, only twenty or thirty. Where are they ? 



ARISTOCRACY. Ill 

I asked. " At home on their estates, devoured by ennui, 
or in the Alps, or up the Rhine, in the Harz Mountains, 
or in Egypt, or in India, on the Ghauts." But, witli 
such interests at stake, how can these men afford to 
neglect tliem ? " O," replied my friend, " why should 
they work for themselves, when every man in England 
works for them, and will suffer before they come to 
harm ? " The hardest radical instantly uncovers, and 
changes his tone to a lord. It was remarked on the 
10th April, 1818 (the day of the Chartist demonstration), 
that the upper classes were, for the first time, actively 
interesting themselves in their own defence, and men of 
rank were sworn special constables, with the rest. " Be- 
sides, why need they sit out the debate ? Has not the 
Duke of Wellington, at this moment, their proxies, — the 
proxies of fifty peers in his pocket, to vote for them, if 
there be an emergency ? " 

It is however true, that the existence of the House of 
Peers as a branch of the government entitles them to fill 
half the Cabinet; and their weight of property and station 
gives them a virtual nomination of the other half; whilst 
they have their share in the subordinate offices, as a school 
of training. This monopoly of political power has given 
them their intellectual and social eminence in Europe. 
A few law lords and a few political lords take the brunt 
of public business. In the army, the nobility fill a large 
part of the high commissions, and give to these a tone of 
expense and splendor, and also of exclusiveness. They 
have borne their full share of duty and danger in this 
service ; and there are few noble families which have not 
paid in some of their members, the debt of life or limb, 



14>i ENGLISH TRAITS. 

ill the sacrifices of tlie Russian war. For the rest, the 
nobility have the lead in matters of state, and of expense ; 
in questions of taste, in social usages, in convivial and 
domestic hospitalities. In general, all that is required of 
them is to sit securely, to preside at public meetings, to 
countenance charities, and to give the example of that 
decorum so dear to the British heart. 

If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what ser- 
vice this class have rendered ? — uses appear, or they 
would have perished long ago. Some of these are easily 
enumerated, others more subtle make a part of uncon- 
scious history. Their institution is one step in the prog- 
ress of society. For a race yields a nobility in some form, 
however we name the lords, as surely as it yields women. 

The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated 
men, born to wealth and power, who have run through 
every country, and kept in every country the best com- 
pany, have seen every secret of art and nature, and, when 
men of any ability or ambition, have been consulted in 
the conduct of every important action. You cannot wield 
great agencies without lending yourself to them, and 
when it happens that the s})iiit of the earl meets his 
rank and duties, we have the best examples of behavior. 
Power of any kind readily appears in the manners ; and 
beneficent power, le talent de bieti /aire, gives a majesty 
which cannot be concealed or resisted. 

These people seem to gain as much as they lose by 
their position. They survey society, as from the top of 
St. Paul's, and if they never hear plain truth from men, 
they see the best of everything, in every kind, and they 
see things so grouped and amassed as to infer easily the 



ARISTOCRACY. 143 

sum and genius, instead of tedious particularities. Their 
good behavior deserves all its fame, and they have that 
simplicity, and that air of repose, which are the finest 
ornament of greatness. 

The upper classes have only birth, say the people here, 
and not thoughts. Yes, but they have manners, and 't is 
wonderful, how much talent runs into manners : — no- 
where and never so much as in England, They have the 
sense of superiority, the absence of all the ambitious 
effort which disgusts in the aspiring classes, a pure tone 
of thought and feeling, and the power to command, 
among their other luxuries, the presence of the most 
accomplished men in their festive meetings. 

Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. They wear 
the laws as ornaments, and walk by their faith in their 
painted May-Fair, as if among the forms of gods. The 
economist of 1835 who asks, of what use are the lords? 
may learn of Franklin to ask, of what use is a baby? 
They have been a social church proper to inspire senti- 
ments mutually honoring the lover and the loved. Po- 
liteness is the ritual of society, as prayers are of the 
church; a school of manners, and a gentle blessing to 
the age in which it grew. 'T is a romance adorning 
English life with a larger horizon; a midway heaven, 
fulfilling to their sense their fairy tales and poetry. This, 
just as far as the breeding of the nobleman, really made 
him brave, handsome, accomplished, and great-hearted. 

On general grounds, whatever tends to form manners, 
or to finish men, has a great value. Every one who has 
tasted the delight of friendship, will respect every social 
guard which our manners can establish, tending to secure 



144 ENGLISH THAITS. 

from the intrusion of frivolous and distasteful people. 
The jealousy of every class to guard itself, is a testimony 
to the reality they have found in life. When a man once 
knows that he has done justice to himself, let him dis- 
miss all terrors of aristocracy as superstitions, so far as 
he is concerned. He who keeps the door of a mine, 
whether of cobalt, or mercury, or nickel, or plumbago, 
securely knows that the world cannot do without him. 
Everybody who is real is open and ready for that which 
is also real. 

Besides, these are they who make England that strong- 
box and museum it is ; who gather and protect works of 
art, dragged from amidst burning cities and revolution- 
ary countries, and brought hither out of all the world. I 
look with respect at houses six, seven, eight hundred, or, 
like Warwick Castle, nine hundred years old. I par- 
doned high park fences, when I saw, that, besides does 
and pheasants, these have preserved Arundel marbles, 
Townley galleries, Howard and Spenserian libraries, 
Warwick and Portland vases, Saxon manuscripts, monas- 
tic architectures, millennial trees, and breeds of cattle 
elsewhere extinct. In these manors, after the frenzy of 
war and destruction subsides a little, the antiquary finds 
the frailest Roman jar, or crumbling Egyptian mummy- 
case, without so much as a new layer of dust, keeping 
the series of history unbroken, and waiting for its inter- 
preter, who is sure to arrive. These lords are the treas- 
urers and librarians of mankind, engaged by their pride 
and wealth to this function. 

Yet there were other works for British dukes to do. 
George Loudon, Quintinyc, Evelyn, had taught them to 



ARISTOCRACY. 145 

make gardens. Arthur Young, Bakewell, and Meclii 
Lave made them agricultural. Scotland was a camp 
until the day of Culloden. The Dukes of Atliol, Suther- 
land, Buccleugh, and the Marquis of Breadalbane have 
introduced the rape-culture, the sheep-farm, wheat, drain- 
age, the plantation of forests, the artificial replenishment 
of lakes and ponds with fish, the renting of game-pre- 
serves. Against the cry of the old tenantry, and the 
sympathetic cry of the English press, they have rooted 
out and planted anew, and now six millions of people live, 
and hve better on the same land that fed three millions. 

The English barons, in every period, have been brave 
and great, after the estimate and opinion of their times. 
Tlie grand old halls scattered up and down in England 
are dumb vouchers to the state and broad hospitality of 
their ancient lords. Shakspeare's portraits of good Duke 
Humphrey, of Warwick, of Northumberland, of Talbot, 
were drawn in strict consonance with the traditions. A 
sketch of the Earl of Shrewsbury, from the pen of Queen 
Elizabeth's Archbishop Parker ; * Lord Herbert of Cher- 
bury's autobiography ; the letters and essays of Sir 
Philip Sidney ; the anecdotes preserved by the antiqua- 
ries Puller and Collins ; some glimpses at the interiors of 
noble houses, which we owe to Pepys and Evelyn ; the 
details which Ben Jonson's masques (performed at Kenil- 
worth, Althorpe, Belvoir, and other noble houses) record 
or suggest ; down to Aubrey's passages of the life of 
Hobbes in the house of the Earl of Devon, are favorable 
pictures of a romantic style of manners. Penshurst still 
shines for us, and its Christmas revels, " where logs not 

* Dibdin's Literary Reminiscences, Vol. I. xii. 
7 J 



146 ENGLISH TEAITS. 

burn, but men." At Wilton House, the " xircadia " was 
written, amidst conversations with Fulke Greville, Lord 
Brooke, a man of no vulgar mind, as his own poems de- 
clare him. I must hold Ludlow Castle an honest house, 
for which Milton's "Comus" was written, and the com- 
pany nobly bred which performed it with knowledge and 
sympathy. In the roll of nobles are found poets, philos- 
ophers, chemists, astronomers, also men of solid virtues 
and of lofty sentiments ; often they have been the friends 
and patrons of genius and learning, and especially of the 
fine arts ; and at this moment, almost every great house 
has its sumptuous picture-gallery. 

Of course, there is another side to this gorgeous show. 
Every victory was the defeat of a party only less wortliy. 
Castles are proud things, but 't is safest to be outside of 
them. War is a foul game, and yet war is not the worst 
part of aristocratic history. In later times, when the 
Imron, educated only for war, with his brains paralyzed 
by his stomach, found himself idle at home, he grew fat 
and wanton, and a sorry brute. Grammont, Pepys, and 
Evelyn show the kennels to which the king and court 
went in quest of pleasure. Prostitutes taken from the 
theatres were made duchesses, their bastards dukes and 
earls. " The young men sat uppermost, the old serious 
lords were out of favor." The discourse that the king's 
companions had with him was " poor and frothy." No 
man who valued liis head might do what these pot-com- 
panions familiarly did with the king. In logical sequence 
of these dignified revels, Pepys can tell the beggarly shifts 
to which the king was reduced, who could not find paper 
at his council table, and "no handkerchers " in his ward- 



AUISTOCUACY. 147 

robe, " and but three bands to liis neck," and the linen- 
draper and the stationer were out of pocket, and refusing 
to trust liim, and the baker ^vill not bring bread any 
longer. Meantime, the Englisli Channel was swept, and 
London threatened by the Dutch fleet, manned too by 
English sailors, who, having been cheated of their pay for 
years by the king, enlisted with the enemy. 

Tlie Selwyn correspondence in the reign of George 
III. discloses a rottenness in the aristocracy, which 
threatened to decompose the state. The sycophancy and 
sale of votes and honor, for place and title ; lewdness, 
gaming, smuggling, bribery, and cheating; the sneer at 
the childish indiscretion of quarrelling with ten thousand 
a year ; the want of ideas ; the splendor of the titles, and 
the apathy of the nation, are instructive, and make the 
reader pause and explore the firm bounds which confined 
these vices to a handful of rich men. In the reign of the 
Fourth George, things do not seem to have mended, and 
the rotten debauchee let down from a window by an in- 
clined plane into his coach to take the air, was a scandal 
to Europe which the ill fame of his queen and of his 
family did nothing to retrieve. 

Under the present reign, the perfect decorum of the 
Court is thought to have put a check on the gross vices 
of the aristocracy ; yet gaming, racing, drinking, and mis- 
tresses bring them down, and the democrat can still gather 
scandals, if he will. Dismal anecdotes abound, verifying 
the gossip of the last generation of dukes served by bai- 
liifs, with all their plate in pawn ; of great lords living by 
the showing of their houses ; and of an old man wheeled 
in his chair from room to room, whilst his chambers are 



148 ENGLISH TEAITS. 

exliibited to the visitor for money : of ruined dukes and 
earls living in exile for debt. The historic names of the 
Buckinghams, Beaufort s, Marlboroughs, and Hertfords 
have gained no new lustre, and now and then darker 
scandals break out, ominous as the new chapters added 
under the Orleans dynasty to the " Causes Celebres " in 
France. Even peers, who are men of worth and public 
spirit, are overtaken and embarrassed by their vast ex- 
pense. The respectable Duke of Devonshire, willing to 
be the MecEEuas and Lucullus of his island, is reported 
to have said that he cannot live at Chatswortli I'mt one 
month in the year. Their many houses eat them up. 
They cannot sell them, because they are entailed. They 
will not let them, for pride's sake, but keep them empty, 
aired, and the grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of 
four or five thousand pounds a year. The spending is 
for a great part in servants, in many houses- exceeding a 
hundred. 

Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, which, 
because it squanders such vast power of benefit, has the 
mischief of crime. " They might be little Providences 
on earth," said my friend, "and they are, for the most 
part, jockeys and fops." Campbell says : "Acquaintance 
with the nobility, I could never keep up. It requires a 
life of idleness, dressing, and attendance on their parties." 
I suppose, too, that a feeling of self-respect is driving 
cultivated men out of this society, as if the noble were 
slow to receive the lessons of the times, and had not 
learned to disguise his pride of place. A man of wit, 
who is also one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion, 
confessed to his friend, that he could not enter their 



ARISTOCRACY. 149 

houses without being made to feel that they were great 
lords, aud lie a low plebeian. With the tribe of artistes, 
including the musical tribe, the patrician morgue keeps 
no terms, but excludes them. When Julia Grisi and 
Mario sang at the houses of the Duke of Wellington and 
other grandees, a ribbon was stretched between the 
singer and the company. 

When every noble was a soldier, they were carefully 
bred to great personal prowess. The education of a sol- 
dier is a simpler affair than that of an earl in the nine- 
teenth century. And this was very seriously pursued ; 
they were expert in every species of equitation, to the 
most dangerous practices, and this down to the accession 
of William of Orange. But graver men appear to have 
trained their sons for civil affairs. Elizabeth extended 
her thought to the future ; and Sir Philip Sidney in his 
letter to his brother, and Milton and Evelyn, gave plain 
and hearty counsel. Already, too, the English noble 
aud squire were preparing for the career of the country- 
gentleman, and his peaceable expense. They went from 
city to city, learning receipts to make perfumes, sweet 
powders, pomanders, antidotes, gathering seeds, gems, 
coins, and divers curiosities, preparing for a private life 
thereafter, in which they should take pleasure ui these 
recreations. 

All advantages given to absolve the young patrician 
from intellectual labor are of course mistaken. " In the 
university, noblemen are exempted from the public exer- 
cises for the degree, etc., by which they attain a degree 
called honorary. At the same time the fees they must 
pay for matriculation, and on all other occasions, are 



150 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

much higher."* Fuller records "the observation of 
foreigners, that Englishmen, by making their children 
gentlemen, before they are men, cause they are so seldom 
wise men." This cockering justifies Dr. Johnson's bitter 
apology for primogeniture, " that it makes but one fool 
in a family." 

The revolution in society has reached this class. The 
great povpers of industrial art have no exclusion of name 
or blood. The tools of our time, namely, steam, ships, 
printing, money, and popular education, belong to those 
who can handle them ; and their effect has been, that ad- 
vantages once confined to men of family are now open to 
the whole ipiddle class. The road that grandeur levels 
for his coach, toil can travel in his cart. 

This is more manifest every day, but I think it is true 
throughout English history. English history, wisely 
read, is the vindication of the brain of that people. Here, 
at last, were climate and condition friendly to the work- 
ing faculty. Who now will work and dare, shall rule. 
This is the charter, or the chartism, which fogs, and seas, 
and rains ])roclaimed, — that intellect and personal force 
should make the law ; that industry and administrative 
talent should administer; that work should wear the 
crown. I know that not this, but something else is pre- 
tended. The fiction with which the noble and the by- 
stander equally please themselves is, that the former is of 
unbroken descent from the Norman, and so has never 
worked for eight hundred years. All the families are 
new, but the name is old, and they have made a covenant 
with their memories not to disturb it. But the analysis 

* Huber, History of Euglish Universities. 



ARISTOCRACY. 131 

of the peerage and gentry shows the rapid decay and 
extinction of old families, the continual recmiting of these 
from new blood. The doors, though ostentatiously 
guarded, are really open, and hence the power of the 
bribe. All the barriers to rank only whet the thirst, and 
enhance the prize. " Now," said Nelson, wlien clearing 
for battle, " a peerage, or Westminster Abbey ! " "I have 
no illusion left," said Sidney Smith, " but the Archbishop 
of Canterbury." " The lawyers," said Burke, " are only 
birds of passage in this House of Commons," and tlien 
added, with a new figure, " they have their best bower 
anchor in the House of Lords." 

Another stride that has been taken, appears in the 
perishing of heraldry. Wiiilst the privileges of nobility 
are passing to the middle class, the badge is discredited, 
and the titles of lordship are getting musty and cumber- 
some. I wonder that sensible men have not been already 
impatient of them. They belong, with wigs, powder, and 
scarlet coats, to an earlier age, and may be advanta- 
geously consigned, with paint and tattoo, to the digni- 
taries of Australia and Polynesia. 

A multitude of English, educated at the universities, 
bred into their society with manners, ability, and the 
gifts of fortune, are every day confronting the peers on 
a footing of equality, and outstripping them, as often, in 
the race of honor and influence. That cultivated class is 
large and ever enlarging. It is computed that, with titles 
and without, there are seventy thousand of these people 
coming and going in London, who make up what is 
called high society. They cannot shut their eyes to tlie 
fact that an untitled nobility possess all the power with- 



153 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

out the inconveniences that belong to rank, and tlie rich 
Englislinian goes over the world at the present day, 
drawing more than all the advantages which the strong- 
est of his kings could command. 



CHAPTER XII. 

rNHEE-SITIES. 

• Of British universities, Cambridge has the most illus- 
trious names on its list. At the present day, too, it has 
the advantage of Oxford, counting in its alumni a greater 
number of distinguished scholars. I regret that I had 
but a single day wherein to see King's College Chapel, 
the beautiful lawns and gardens of the colleges, and a few 
of its gownsmen. 

But I availed myself of some repeated invitations to 
Oxford, where I had introductions to Dr. Daubeny, Pro- 
fessor of Botany, and to the Regius Professor of Divinity, 
as well as to a valued friend, a Pellow of Oriel, and went 
tliither on the last day of March, 1848. I was the guest 
of my friend in Oriel, was housed close upon that college, 
and I lived on college hospitalities. 

My new friends showed me their cloisters, the Bodleian 
Library, the Randolph Gallery, Merton Hall, and the 
rest. I saw several faithful, high-minded young men, 
some of them in the mood of making sacrifices for peace 
of mind, — a topic, of course, on which I had no coun- 
sel to offer. Their affectionate and gregarious ways re- 
minded me at once of the habits of our Cambridge men. 



UNIVERSITIES. . 153 

though I imputed to these English an advantage in their 
secure and polished manners. The halls are rich with 
oaken wainscoting and ceiling. The pictures of the 
founders hang from the walls ; the tables glitter with 
plate. A youth came forward to the upper table, and 
pronounced the ancient form of grace before meals, 
which, I suppose, has been in use here for ages, Bene- 
dictus henedicat ; henedicitur, benedicatar. 

It is a curious proof of the English use and wont, or 
of their good-nature, that these young men are locked up 
every night at nine o'clock, and the porter at each hall is 
required to give the name of any belated student who is 
admitted after that hour. Still more descriptive is the 
fact, that out of twelve hundred young men, comprising 
the most spirited of the aristocracy, a duel has never 
occurred. 

Oxford is old, even in England, and conservative. Its 
foundations date from Alfred, and even from Arthur, if, 
as is alleged, the Pheryllt of the Druids had a seminary 
here. In the reign of Edward I., it is pretended, here 
were thirty thousand students ; and nineteen most noble 
foundations were then establisiied. Chaucer found it as 
firm as if it had always stood ; and it is in British story, 
rich with great names, the school of the island, and the 
link of England to the learned of Europe. Hither came 
Erasmus, with delight, in 1497. Albericus Gentilis, in 
1580, was relieved and maintained by the university. 
Albert Alaskie, a noble Polonian, Prince of Sirad, who 
visited England to admire the wisdom of Queen Eliza- 
beth, was entertained with stage-plays in the Refectory 
of Christ-church, in 15 S3. Isaac Casaubon, coming from 
7* 



154 . ENGLISH TEAITS. 

Henri Quatre of France, by invitation of James I., was 
admitted to Christ's College, in July, 1613. I saw the 
Ashmolean Museum, whither Elias Ashmole, in 1682, 
sent twelve cart-loads of rarities. Here indeed was the 
Olyrnpia of all Antony Wood's and Aubrey's games and 
heroes, and every inch of ground has its lustre. Tor 
Wood's Athena Oxonienses, or calendar of the writers 
of Oxford for two hundred years, is a lively record of 
English manners and merits, and as much a national 
monument as Purchas's Pilgrims or Hansard's Register. 
On every side, Oxford is redolent of age and authority. 
Its gates shut of themselves against modern innovation. 
It is still governed by the statutes of Arclibisliop Laud. 
The books in Merton Library are still chained to the 
wall. Here, on August 27, 1660, John Milton's Pro 
Popido Anylicano Defensio and Icomclastes were com- 
mitted to the flames. I saw the school-court or quadran- 
gle, where, in 1683, the Convocation caused the Leviatlian 
of Thomas Hobbes to be publicly burnt. I do not know 
whether tiiis learned body have yet heard of the Declara- 
tion of American Independence, or whether the Ptole- 
maic astronomy does not still hold its ground against the 
novelties of Copernicus. 

As many sons, almost so many benefactors. It is 
usual for a nobleman, or indeed for almost every wealthy 
student, on quitting college, to leave behind him some 
article of plate ; and gifts of all values, from a hall, or a 
fellowship, or a library, down to a picture or a spoon, are 
continually accruing, in the course of a century. My 
friend Doctor J. gave me the following anecdote. In 
Sir Thomas Lawrence's collection at London were the 



UNIVERSITIES. 155 

cartoons of Rapliael and Michel Angelo. This inestima- 
ble prize was offered to Oxford University for seven 
thonsand pounds. The offer was accepted, and the com- 
mittee charged with the affair had collected three thou- 
sand pounds, when among other friends they called on 
Lord Eldon. Instead of a hundred pounds, he surprised 
them by putting down his name for three thousand 
pounds. They tqld him, they should now very easily 
raise the remainder. "No," he said, " your men have 
probably already contributed all they can spare ; I can 
as well give the rest " : and he withdrew his check for 
three thousand, and wrote four thousand pounds. I saw 
the whole collection in April, 1848. 

In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed me tlie 
manuscript Plato, of the date of a., d. 896, brought by 
Dr. Clarke from Egypt; a manuscript Virgil, of the same 
century; the first Bible printed at Mentz (I believe in 
1450) ; and a duplicate of the same, which had been defi- 
cient in about twenty leaves at the end. But, one day, 
being in Venice, lie bought a room full of books and 
manuscripts — every scrap and fragment — for four 
thousand louis d'ors, and had the doors locked and 
sealed by the consul. On proceeding, afterwards, to 
examine his purchase, he found the twenty deficient 
pages of his Mentz Bible, in perfect order ; brought 
them to Oxford, with the rest of his purchase, and 
placed them in the volume ; but has too mucli awe for 
the Providence that appears in bibliography also, to suf- 
fer the reunited parts to be rebound. The oldest build- 
ing here is two hundred years younger than the frail 
manuscript brought by Dr. Clarke from Egypt. No 



156 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

candle or fire is ever lighted in the Bodleian. Its cata- 
logue is the standard catalogue on the desk of every 
library in Oxford. In each several college, they under- 
score in red ink on this catalogue the titles of books 
contained in the library of that college, — the theory 
being that the Bodleian has all books. This rich library 
spent during the last year (1847) for the purchase of 
books £ 1,668. 

The logical English train a scholar as they train an 
engineer. Oxford is a Greek factory, as Wilton mills 
Aveave carpet, and Sheffield grinds steel. They know the 
use of a tutor, as they know the use of a horse ; and they 
draw the greatest amount of benefit out of both. The 
reading-men are -kept by hard walking, hard riding, and 
measured eating and drinking, at the top of their condi- 
tion, and two days before the examination, do no work, 
but lounge, ride, or run, to be fresh on the college 
doomsday. Seven years' residence is the theoretic 
period for a master's degree. In point of fact, it has 
long been three years' residence, and four years more 
of standing. This " three years " is about twenty-one 
months in all.* 

" The whole expense," says Professor Sewel, " of or- 
dinary college tuition at Oxford, is about sixteen guineas 
a year." But this plausible statement may deceive a 
reader unacquainted with the fact, that the principal 
teaching rehed on is private tuition. And the expenses 
of private tuition are reckoned at from £ 50 to £ 70 a 
year, or $ 1,000 for the whole course of three years and 

* Huber, II. T). 304. 



UNIVERSITIES. 157 

a lialf. At Cambridge $ 750 a year is economical, and 
$ 1,500 not extravagant.* 

The number of students and of residents, the dignity 
of the authorities, the value of the foundations, the his- 
tory and the architecture, the known sympathy of entire 
Britain in what is done there, justify a dedication to 
study in the undergraduate, such as cannot easily be in 
America, where his college is half suspected by the 
Freshman to be insignificant in the scale beside trade 
and politics. Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, nu- 
merous and dignified enough to rank with other estates 
in the realm ; and where fame and secular promotion are 
to be had for study, and in a direction which has the 
unanimous respect of all cultivated nations. 

This aristocracy, of course, repairs its own losses ; fills 
places, as they fall vacant, from the body of students. 
The number of fellowships at Oxford is 540, averaging 
£ 200 a year, with lodging and diet at the college. If a 
young American, loving learning, and hindered by pov- 
erty, were offered a home, a table, the walks, and the 
library, in one of these academical palaces, and a thousand 
dollars a year as long as he chose to remain a bachelor, 
he would dance for joy. Yet these young men thus hap- 
pily placed, and paid to read, are impatient of their few 
checks, and many of them preparing to resign their fellow- 
ships. They shuddered at the prospect of dying a Fellow, 
and they pointed out to me a paralytic old man, who was 
assisted into the hall. As the number of undergraduates 
at Oxford is only about 1,200 or 1,300, and many of these 
are never competitors, the chance of a fellowship is very 

* Bristed, Five Years at an English University. 



158 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

great. The income of tlie nineteen colleges is conjec- 
tured at £ 150,000 a year. 

The effect of this drill is the radical knowledge of 
Greek and Latin, and of mathematics, and the solidity 
and taste of English criticism. Whatever luck there may 
be in this or that award, an Eton captain can write Latin 
longs and shorts, can turn the Court-Guide into hex- 
ameters, and it is certain that a Senior Classic can quote 
correctly from the Corpus Poetarum, and is critically 
learned in all the humanities. Greek erudition exists on 
the Isis and Cam, whether the Maud man or the Brazen 
Nose man be properly ranked or not ; the atmosphere is 
loaded with Greek learning ; the whole river has reached 
a certain height, and kills all that growth of weeds, which 
this Castalian water kills. The English nature takes 
culture kindly. So Milton thought. It refines the Norse- 
man. Access to the Greek mind lifts his standard of 
taste. He has enough to think of, and, unless of an im- 
pulsive nature, is indisposed from writing or speaking, 
by the fulness of his mind, and the new severity of his 
taste. The great silent crowd of thorough-bred Grecians 
always known to be around him, the English writer 
cannot ignore. They prune his orations, and point his 
pen. Hence, the style and tone of English journalism. 
The men have learned accuracy and comprehension, 
logic, and pace, or speed of working. They have bot- 
tom, endurance, wind. When born with good constitu- 
tions, they make those eupeptic studying-mills, the cast- 
iron men, the dura ilia, whose powers of performance 
compare with ours, as the steam-hammer M'ith the music- 
box ; — Cokes, Mansfields, Scldens, and Bentleys, and 



UNIVERSITIES. 159 

when it happens that a superior brain puts a rider on 
this admirable horse, we obtain those masters of the 
world who combine the highest energy in affairs, with 
a supreme culture. 

It is contended by those who have been bred at Eton, 
Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sen- 
timent within each of those schools is high-toned and 
manly ; that, in their playgrounds, courage is universally 
admired, meanness despised, manly feelings and gener- 
ous conduct are encouraged ; that an unwritten code of 
honor deals to the spoiled child of rank and to the child 
of upstart wealth an even-handed justice, purges their 
nonsense out of both, and does all that can be done to 
make them gentlemen. 

Again, at the universities, it is urged, that all goes to 
form what England values as the flower of its national 
life, _ a well-educated gentleman. The German Huber, 
in describing to his countrymen the attributes of an 
English gentleman, frankly admits, that "in Germany, 
we have nothing of the kind. A gentleman must possess 
a political character, an independent and public position, 
or, at least, the right of assuming it. He must have 
average opulence, either of his own, or in his family. 
He should also have bodily activity and strength, unat- 
tainable by our sedentary life in public offices. The race 
of English gentlemen presents an appearance of manly 
vigor and form, uot elsewhere to be found among an equal 
number of persons. No other nation produces the stock. 
And in England, it has deteriorated. The university is 
a decided presumption in any man's favor. And so em- 
inent are the members that a glance at the calendars will 



160 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

show tliat in all the world one cannot be in better com- 
pany than on the books of one of the larger Oxford or 
Cambridge colleges," * 

These seminaries are finishing schools for the upper 
classes, and not for the poor. The useful is exploded. 
Tlie definition of a public school is " a school wliich 
excludes all that could fit a man for standing behind a 
counter." f 

No doubt, the foundations have been perverted, Ox- 
ford, which equals in wealth several of the smaller Eu- 
ropean states, shuts up the lectureships which were made 
" public for all men thereunto to have concourse" ; mis- 
spends the revenues bestowed for such youths "as should 
be most meet for towardness, poverty, and painfulness " ; 
there is gross favoritism ; many chairs and many fellow- 
ships are made beds of ease ; and 't is likely that the 
university will know how to resist and make inoperative 
the terrors of parliamentary inquiry; no doubt, their 
learning is grown obsolete; but Oxford also has its 
merits, and I found here also proof of the national fidelity 
and thoroughness. Such knowledge as they prize they 
possess and impart. Whether in course or by indirec- 
tion, whether by a cramming tutor or by examiners with 
prizes and foundation scholarsliips, education according to 
the English notion of it is acquired. I looked over the 
Examination Papers of tlie year 1848, for the various 
scholarships and fellowships, the Lusby, the Hertford, 

* Huber, History of the English Universities, Newman's 
Translation, 

t See Bristed, Five Years in an English University. New 
York, 1852. 



UNIVERSITIES. 161 

the Dean-Ireland, and the University (copies of which 
were kindly given me by a Greek professor), containing 
the tasks which many competitors had victoriously per- 
formed, and 1 believed they would prove too severe tests 
for tlie candidates for a Bachelor's degree in Yale or 
Harvard. And, in general, here was proof of a more 
search hig study in the appointed directions, and the 
knowledge pretended to be conveyed was conveyed. 
Oxford sends out yearly twenty or thirty very able 
men, and three or four hundred well-educated men. 

The diet and rough exercise secure a certain amount 
of old Norse power. A fop will fight, and, in exigent 
circumstances, will play the manly part. In seeing these 
youths, I believed I saw already an advantage in vigor 
and color and general habit, over their contemporaries in 
the American colleges. No doubt much of the power 
and brilliancy of the reading-men is merely constitutional 
or hygienic. With a hardier habit and i-esolute gymnas- 
tics, with five miles more walking, or five ounces less 
eating, or with a saddle and gallop of twenty miles a day, 
with skating and rowing matches, the American would 
arrive at as robust exegesis, and cheery and hilarious 
tone. I should readily concede these advantages, which 
it would be easy to acquire, if I did not find also that 
they read better than we, and write better. 

English wealth falling on their school and university 
training, makes a systematic reading of the best authors, 
and to the end of a knowledge how the things whereof 
they treat really stand : whilst pamphleteer or journalist 
reading for an argument for a party, or reading to write, 
or, at all events, for some by end imposed on them, must 

K 



162 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

read meanly and fragmentarily. Charles I. said, that he 
understood English law as well as a gentleman ought to 
understand it. 

Then they have access to books ; the rich libraries col- 
lected at every one of many thousands of houses, give 
an advantage not to be attained by a youth in this coun- 
try, when one thinks how much more and better may be 
learned by a scholar, who, immediately on hearing of 
a book, can consult it, than by one who is on the quest 
for years, and reads inferior books, because he cannot 
find the best. 

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each 
other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well- 
read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and 
selection. 

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which 
seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the rou- 
tine : as churches and monasteries persecute youthful 
saints. Yet we all send our sons to college, and, though 
he be a genius, he must take his chance. The university 
must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to 
the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity. Ox- 
ford is a library, and the professors must be librarians. 
And I should as soon think of quarrelling with the jan- 
itor for not magnifying his office by hostile sallies into 
the street, like the Governor of Kertch or Kinburn, as 
of quarrelling with the professors for not admiring the 
young neologists who pluck the beards of Euclid and 
Aristotle, or for not attempting themselves to fill their 
vacant shelves as original writers. 

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if we 



RELIGION. 163 

Will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists 
there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of 
tlie House of Commons. It is rare, precarious, eccen- 
tric, and darkliug. England is the land of mixture and 
surprise, and Avhen you have settled it that the univer- 
sities are moribund, out comes a poetic influence from 
the heart of Oxford, to mould the opinions of cities, to 
build their houses as simply as birds their nests, to give 
veracity to art, and charm mankind, as an appeal to 
moral order always must. But besides this restorative 
genius, the best poetry of England of this age, in the 
old forms, comes from two graduates of Cambridge. 



CHAPTEK, XIII. 

RELIGION. 

No people, at the present day, can be explained by 
their national religion, Tliey do not feel responsible for 
it; it lies far outside of them. Their loyalty to truth 
and their labor and expenditure rest on real foundations, 
and not on a national church. And English life, it is 
evident, does not grow out of the Athanasian creed, or 
the Articles, or the Eucharist. It is with religion as 
with marriage. A youth marries in haste; afterwards, 
when his mind is opened to the reason of the conduct of 
life, he is asked, what he thinks of the institution of mar- 
riage, and of the right relations of the sexes. 'I should 
have much to say,' he might reply, ' if the question were 
open, but I have a wife and children, and all question is 



1G4 ENGLISH TEAITS. 

closed for me.' In ilie havbarous days of a nation, some 
cultm is formed or imported ; altars are built, tithes are 
paid, priests ordained. The education and expenditure 
of the country take that direction, and when wealth, re- 
finement, great men, and ties to the world supervene, its 
prudent men say, why fight against Fate, or lift these 
absurdities which are now mountainous ? Better find 
some niche or crevice in this mountain of stone Avhich 
religious ages have quarried and carved, wherein to 
bestow yourself, than attempt anything ridiculously and 
dangerously above your strength, like removing it. 

In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes say, 
as to-day, in front of Dundee Church tower, which is 
eight hundred years old, ' this was built by another and 
a better race than any that now look on it,' And, plainly, 
there has been great power of sentiment at work in this 
island, of which these buildings are the proofs : as vol- 
canic basalts show the work of fire which has been extin- 
guished for ages. England felt the full heat of the Chris- 
tianity which fermented Europe, and drew, like the 
chemistry of fire, a firm line between barbarism and cul- 
ture. Tlie power of the religious sentiment put an end 
to human sacrifices, checked appetite, inspired the cru- 
sades, inspired resistance to tyrants, inspired self-respect, 
set bounds to serfdom and slavery, founded libert}^ 
created the religious architecture, — York, Newstead, 
Westminster, Fountains Abbey, llipon, Beverlc}^, and 
Dundee, — works to which the key is lost, with the senti- 
ment which created them ; inspired the English Bible, 
the liturgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of Bicli- 
ard of Devizes. The priest translated the Yulgatc, and 



HELIGION. 165 

translated tlie sanctities of old liagiology into English 
virtues on English ground. It was a certain affiiinative 
or aggressive state of the Caucasian races. Man awoke 
refreshed by the sleep of ages. The violence of the 
Northern savages exasperated Christianity into power. 
It lived by the love of the people. Bishop Wilfrid man- 
umitted two hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found 
attached to the soil. The clergy obtained respite from 
labor for the boor on the Sabbath, and on church festi- 
vals. " The lord who compelled his boor to labor be- 
tween sunset on Saturday and sunset on Sunday, forfeited 
him altogether." The priest came out of the people, and 
sympathized with his class. The church was the media- 
tor, check, and democratic principle in Europe. Latimer, 
Wicliffe, Arundel, Cobham, Antony Parsons, Sir Harry 
Vane, George Eox, Penn, Bunyan, are the democrats, as 
well as the saints of their times. The Catholic Church, 
thrown on this toihng, serious people, has made in four- 
teen centuries a massive system, close fitted to the man- 
ners and genius of the country, at once domestical and 
stately. In the long time, it has blended with every- 
thing in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves 
through a zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day of 
the year, every town and market and headland and monu- 
ment, and has coupled itself with the almanac, that no 
court can be held, no field ploughed, no horse shod, with- 
out some leave from the church. All maxims of pru- 
dence or shop or farm are fixed and dated by the church. 
Hence, its strength in the agricultural districts. The 
distribution of land into parishes enforces a church sanc- 
tion to every civil privilege; and the gradation of the 



166 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

clergy, — prelates for the rich, and curates for tlie poor, 
— with the fact that a classical education has been se- 
cured to the clergyman, uuikes them " the link which 
unites tlie sequestered peasantry with the intellectual 
advancement of the age." * 

The EngUsh Church has many certificates to show, of 
humble effective service in humanizing the people, in 
cheering and refining men, feeding, heaUng, and educat- 
ing. It has the seal of martyrs and confessors ; the 
noblest books ; a sublime architecture ; a ritual marked 
by the same secular merits, nothing cheap or purchasa- 
ble. 

From this slow-grown church important reactions pro- 
ceed ; much for culture, much for giving a direction to 
the nation's affection and will to-day. The carved and 
pictured chapel — its entire surface animated with image 
and emblem — made the parish-church a sort of book 
and Bible to the people's eye. 

Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a service 
in the vernacular tongue, it was the tutor and university 
of the people. In York minster, on the day of the 
enthronization of the new archbishop, I heard the ser- 
vice of evening prayer read and chanted in tlie choir. 
It was strange to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal 
of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of the world, read 
with circumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th Jan- 
uary, 1848, to the decorous English audience, just fresh 
from the Times newspaper and their wine ; and listening 
with all the devotion of national pride. That was bind- 
ing old and new to some purpose. The reverence for 

* Wordsworth. 



RELIGION. 167 

the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has 
tiie history of tlie world, been preserved, and is pre- 
served. Here in England every day a chapter of Gen- 
esis, and a leader in the Times. 

Another part of the same service on this occasion was 
not insignificant. Handel's coronation anthem, God save 
the King, was played by Dr. Camidge on the organ, with 
sublime effect. The minster and the music were made 
for each other. It was a hint of the part the church 
plays as a political engine. From his infancy, every 
Englishman is accustomed to hear daily prayers for the 
queen, for the royal family, and the Parliament, by name ; 
and this lifelong consecration of these personages cannot 
b^ without influence on his opinions. 

Tlie universities, also, are parcel of the ecclesiastical 
system, and their first design is to form the clergy. Thus 
the clergy for a thousand years have been the scholars of 
the nation. 

The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken 
order and tradition of its church ; the liturgy, ceremony, 
architecture ; the sober grace, the good company, the 
connection with the throne, and with history, which 
adorn it. And whilst it endears itself thus to men of 
more taste than activity, the stability of the English 
nation is passionately enlisted to its support, from its 
inextricable connection with the cause of public order, 
with politics, and with the funds. 

Good churches are not built by bad men; at least 
there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in soci- 
ety. These minsters were neither built nor filled by 



168 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

atheists. No clmrcli has had more learned, mdustrlous, 
or devoted men ; plenty of " clerks and bishops, who, 
out of their gowns, would turn their backs on no man." * 
Their architecture still glows with faith in immortality. 
Heats and genial periods arrive in history, or, shall we 
say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by which high tides 
are caused in the human spirit, and great virtues and 
talents appear, as in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and 
again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when 
the nation was full of genius and piety. 

But the age of the Wicliffes, Cobhams, Arundels, Beck- 
ets ; of the Latimers, Mores, Cranmers ; of the Taylors, 
Leightons, Herberts ; of the Slierlocks, and Butlers, is 
gone. Silent revolutions in opinion have made it impos- 
sible that men like tliese should return or find a place in 
their once sacred stalls. The spirit that dwelt in this 
church has glided away to animate other activities ; and 
they who come to the old shrines find apes and players 
rustling the old garments. 

The religion of England is part of good breeding. 
When you see on the Continent the well-dressed Eiiglisli- 
man come into his ambassador's cliapel, and put his face 
for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot 
help feeling how much national pride prays with him, 
and the religion of a gentleman. So far is he from 
attaching any meaning to tlie words, that he believes 
liimself to liave done almost the generous thing, and that 
it is very condescending in him to pray to God. A great 
duke said on the occasion of a victory, in the House of 
Lords, that he thought the Almighty God had not been 

* Fuller. 



RELIGION. 169 

well used by them, and that it would become their mag- 
iiauimitj, after so great successes, to take order that a 
proper acknowledgment be made. It is tlie church of 
the gentry ; but it is not the church of the poor. The 
operatives do not own it, and gentlemen lately testified 
in the House of Commons that in their lives they never 
saw a poor man in a ragged coat inside a church. 

The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigorous 
English understanding shows how much wit and folly 
can agree in one brain. Their religion is a quotation ; 
tlieir church is a doll ; and any examination is interdicted 
with screams of terror. In good company, you expect 
them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar ; but they 
do not ; they are the vulgar. 

The English, in common perhaps with Christendom in 
the nineteenth century, do not respect power, but only 
performance; value ideas only for an economic result. 
Wellington esteems a saint only as far as he can be an 
army chaplain : " Mr. Briscoll, by his admirable conduct 
and good sense, got the better of Methodism, which had 
appeared among the soldiers, and once among the offi- 
cers." They value a pbilosoplieras they value an apothe- 
cary who brings bark or a drench ; and inspiration is only 
some blowpipe, or a finer mechanical aid. 

I suspect that there is in an Englishman's brain a valve 
that can be closed at pleasure, as an engineer shuts off 
steam. The most sensible and well-informed men possess 
the power of thinking just so far as the bishop in relig- 
ious matters, and as the chancellor of the exchequer in 
politics. They talk with courage and logic, and show 
you magnificent results ; but the same men who have 



170 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

brouglit free-trade or geology to their present stuiicUng, 
look grave and lofty, and shut down tlieir valve, as soon 
• as the conversation approaches the English Church. 
After that, you talk with a box-turtle. 

The action of the university, both in what is taught, and 
in the spirit of the place, is directed more on producing 
an English gentleman, than a saint or a psychologist. It 
ripens a bishop, and extrudes a philosopher. I do not 
know that tiiere is more cabalism in the Anglican, than 
in other churches, but the Anglican clergy are identified 
with the aristocracy. They say, here, that, if you talk 
with a clergyman, you are sure to find him well bred, 
informed, and candid. He entertains your thought or 
your project with sympathy and praise. But if a second 
clergyman come in, the sympathy is at an end: two to- 
gether are inaccessible to your thought, and, whenever it 
comes to action, the clergyman invariably sides with his 
church. 

The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good 
sense of its forms, by the manly grace of its clergy. The 
gospel it preaches is, ' By taste are ye saved.' It keeps 
the old structures in repair, spends a world of money in 
music and building ; and in buying Pugin, and architec- 
tural literature. It has a general good name for amenity 
and mildness. It is not in ordinary a persecuting church ; 
it is not inquisitorial, not even inquisitive, is perfectly 
well bred, and can shut its eyes on all proper occasions. 
If you let it alone, it will let you alone. But its instinct 
is hostile to all change in politics, literature, or social 
ai-ts. The churcli has not been the founder of the Lon- 
don University, of the Mechanics' Institutes, of the Eree 



RELIGION. 171 

School, or whatever aims at diffusion of knowledge. The 
Platonists of Oxford are as bitter against this heresy, as 
Thomas Taylor. 

The doctrine of the Old Testament is the religion *of 
England. The first leaf of the New Testament it docs 
not open. It believes in a Providence which does not 
treat with levity a pound sterling. They are neither 
transcendentalists nor Christians. They put up no So- 
cratic prayer, much less any saintly prayer for the queen's 
mind ; ask neither for light nor right, but say bluntly, 
" Grant her in health and wealth long to live." And 
one traces this Jewish prayer in all English private his- 
tory, from the prayers of King Richard, in Richard of 
Devizes' Chronicle, to those in the diaries of Sir Samuel 
Rom illy, and of Hay don the painter. "Abroad with my 
wife," writes Pepys piously, " the first time that ever 1 
rode in my own coach ; which do make my heart rejoice 
and praise God, and pray him to bless it to me, and con- 
tinue it." The bill for the naturalization of the Jews (in 
1753) was resisted by petitions from all parts of the king- 
dom, and by petition from the city of London, reprobat- 
ing this bill, as " tending extremely to the dishonor of 
the Christian religion, and extremely injurious to the in- 
terests and commerce of the kingdom in general, and of 
the city of London in particular." 

But they have not been able to congeal humanity by 
act of Parliament. " The heavens journey still and so- 
journ not," and arts, wars, discoveries, and opinion go 
onward at their own pace. The new age has new de- 
sires, new enemies, new trades, new charities, and reads 
the Scriptures with new eyes. The chatter of French 



17^ ENGLISH TRAITS. 

politics, tlie steam-whistle, the hum of the mill, and the ' 
noise of embarking emigrants, had quite put most of 
the old legends out of mind ; so that when you came to 
read the liturgy to a modern congregation, it was almost 
absurd in its unfitness, and suggested a masquerade of 
old costumes. 

No chemist has prospered in the attempt to crystallize 
a religion. It is endogenous, like the skin, and other 
vital organs. A new statement every day. The prophet 
and apostle knew this, and the non-conformist confutes 
the conformists, by quoting the texts they must allow. 
It is the condition of a religion, to require religion for 
its expositor. Prophet and apostle can only be rightly 
understood by prophet and apostle. The statesman 
knows that the religious element will not fail, any more 
than the supply of fibi-ine and chyle ; but it is in its 
nature constructive, and will organize such a church as 
it wants. The wise legislator will spend on temples, 
schools, libraries, colleges, but will shun the enriching of 
priests. If, in any manner, he can leave the election and 
paying of the priest to the people, he will do well. Like 
the Quakers, he may resist the separation of a class of 
priests, and create opportunity and expectation in the 
society, to run to meet natural endowment, in this kind. 
But, when wealth accrues to a chaplaincy, a bishopric, or 
rectorship, it requires moneyed men for its stewards, who 
will give it another direction than to the mystics of their 
day. Of course, money will do after its kind, and will 
steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurcli the people 
to whom it was bequeathed. The class certain to be 
excluded from all preferment are tlie religious, — and 



RELIGION. 173 

driven to other cliurclies ; — which is nature's vis niedi- 
catrix. 

The curates are ill paid, and the prelates are overpaid. 
This abuse draws into the church the children of the 
nobility, and other unfit persons, w4io have a taste for 
expense. Thus a bishop is only a surpliced merchant. 
Through his lawn, I can see the bright buttons of the 
shopman's coat glitter. A wealth like that of Durham 
makes almost a premium on felony. Brougham, in a 
speech in the House of Commons on the Irish elective 
franchise, said, "How will the reverend bishops of the 
other house be able to express their due abhorrence of 
the crime of perjury, who solemnly declare in the pres- 
ence of God, that when they are called upon to accept a 
living, perhaps of £ 4,000 a year, at that very instant, they 
are moved by the Holy Ghost to accept the office and 
administration thereof, and for no other reason what- 
ever ? " The modes of initiation are more damaging 
than custom-house oaths. The bishop is elected by the 
Dean and Prebends of the cathedral. The Queen sends 
these gentlemen a conge (TeUre, or leave to elect; but 
also sends them the name of the person whom they are 
to elect. They go into the cathedral, chant and pray, 
and beseech the Holy Ghost to assist them in their 
choice ; and, after these invocations, invariably find that 
the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the recom- 
mendations of the Queen. 

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as 
long as you run with conformists. But you, who are an 
honest man in other particulars, know, that there is alive 
somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point 



174 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the 
day when you meet him, you sink into the class of coun- 
terfeits. Besides, this succumbing has grave penalties. 
If you take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to 
it. England accepts this ornamented national church, 
and it glazes the eyes, bloats the flesh, gives the voice a 
stertorous clang, and clouds the understanding of the 
receivers. 

The English Church, undermined by German criticism, 
had nothing left but tradition, and was led logically back 
to Romanism. But that was an element which only hot 
heads could breathe : in view of the educated class, 
generally, it was not a fact to front the sun; and the 
alienation of such men from the church became complete. 

Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. Religious per- 
sons are driven out of the Established CImrch into sects, 
which instantly rise to credit, and hold the Establishment 
in check. Nature has sharper remedies, also. The Eng- 
lish, abhorring change in all things, abhorring it most in 
matters of religion, cling to the last rag of form, and are 
dreadfully given to cant. The English (and I wish it 
were confined to them, but 't is a taint in the Anglo- 
Saxon blood in both hemispheres), the English and the 
Americans cant beyond all other nations. The French 
relinquish all that industry to them. What is so odious 
as the polite bows to God, in our books and newspapers ? 
The popular press is flagitious in the exact measure of its 
sanctimony, and the religion of the day is a theatrical 
Sinai, where the thunders are supplied by the property- 
man. The fanaticism and hypocrisy create satire. Punch 
finds an inexhaustible material. Dickens wriles novels 



RELIGION. 175 

on Exeter Hall liumanitj. Thackeray exposes the heart- 
less high life. Nature revenges herself more summarily 
by the heathenism of the lower classes. Lord Shaftes- 
bury calls the poor tliieves together, and reads sermons 
to them, and they call it 'gas.' George Borrow sum- 
mons the Gypsies to hear his discourse on the Hebrews 
in Egypt, and reads to tliem the Apostles' creed in 
Romany. " When I had concluded," he says, " I looked 
around me. The features of the assembly were twisted, 
and the eyes of all turned upon me with a frightful 
squint : not an individual present but squinted ; the gen- 
teel Pepa, the good-humored Chicharona, the Cosdami, 
all squinted : the Gypsy jockey squinted worst of all." 

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She 
has nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an 
intelligent gentleman, and reads fatal interrogations iu 
his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him. 
False position introduces cant, perjury, simony, and ever 
a lower class of mind and character into the clergy ; and, 
when the hierarchy is afraid of science and education, 
afraid of piety, afraid of tradition, and afraid of tlieolog}^ 
there is nothmg left but to quit a church which is no 
longer one. 

But the religion of England, — is it the Established 
Churcli ? no ; is it the sects ? no ; they are only perpetu- 
ations of some private man's dissent, and are to the Es- 
tablished Church as cabs are to a coach, cheaper and 
more convenient, but really the same thing. Where 
dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells elec- 
tricity, or motion, or thought, or gesture. They do not 
dwell or stay at all. Electricity cannot be made fast, 



176 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the 
Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep 
it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; 
it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a 
newness, a surprise, a secret, which perplexes them, and 
puts them out. Yet, if religion be the doing of all good, 
and for its sake the suffering of all evil, sovffrir de tout le 
monde et ne faire sotiffrir personue, that divine secret has 
existed in England from the days of Alfred to those of 
Romilly, of Ciarkson, and of Florence Nightingale, and in 
thousands who have no fame. 



CHAPTEE XIV. 

LITERATURE. 

A STRONG common-sense, which it is not easy to unseat 
or disturb, marks the English mind for a thousand years ; 
a rude strength newly applied to thought, as of. sailors 
and soldiers who had lately learned to read. They have 
no fancy, and never are surprised into a covert or witty 
word, such as pleased the Athenians and Italians, and 
was convertible into a fable not long after ; but they de- 
light in strong earthy expression, not mistakable, coarsely 
true to the human body, and, though spoken among 
princes, equally fit and welcome to the mob. This home- 
liness, veracity, and plain style appear in the earliest 
extant works, and in the latest. It imports into songs 
and ballads the smell of the earth, the breath of cattle, 
and, like a Dutch painter, seeks a household charm, 



LITERATURE. 177 

tlioiigli by pails and pans. They ask their constitutional 
utiHty in verse. The kail and herrings are never out of 
sight. The poet nimbly recovers himself from every 
sally of the imagination. The English muse loves the 
farm-yard, the lane and market. Si»e says, with De 
Stael, " I tramp in the mire with wooden shoes, when- 
ever they would force me into the clouds." For, the 
Englishman has accurate perceptions; takes hold of 
things by the right end, and there is no slipperiness in 
his grasp. He loves the axe, the spade, the oar, the 
gun, the steam-pipe : he has built the engine he uses. 
He is materialist, economical, mercantile. He must be 
treated with sincerity and reality, with muffius and not 
the promise of muffius ; and prefers his hot chop, with 
perfect security and convenience in the eating of it, to 
the chances of the amplest and Erenchiest bill of fare, 
engraved on embossed paper. When he is intellectual, 
and a poet or a philosopiier, he carries the same hard 
truth and the same keen machinery into the mental 
sphere. His mind must stand on a fact. He will not 
be baffled, or catch at clouds, but the mind must have 
a symbol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in 
Dante, is the vice-like tenacity with which he holds a 
mental image before the eyes, as if it were a scutcheon 
I)ainted on a shield. Byron "liked something craggy 
to break his mind upon." A taste for plain strong 
speech, what is called a biblical style, marks the English. 
It is in Alfred, and the Saxon Chronicle, and in the 
Sagas of the Northmen. Latimer was homely. Hobbes 
was perfect in the "noble vulgar speech." Donne, 
Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, Cotton, 
8* L 



178 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and the translators, wrote it. How realistic or material- 
istic in treatment of his subject is Swift. He describes 
his fictitious persons as if for the police. Defoe has no 
insecurity or choice, Hudibras has the same hard men- 
tality, — keeping the truth at once to the senses, and to 
the intellect. 

It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer's hard painting 
of his Canterbury pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shak- 
speare, Spenser, and Milton, in their loftiest ascents, 
have this national grip and exactitude of mind. This 
mental materialism makes the value of English transcen- 
dental genius; in these writers, and in Herbert, Henry 
More, Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxou 
materialism and narrowness, exalted into the sphere of 
intellect, makes the very genius of Shakspeare and Mil- 
ton. When it reaches the pure element, it treads the 
clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its eleva- 
tions, materialistic, its poetry is common-sense inspired ; 
or iron raised to white heat. 

The marriage of the two qualities is in their speech. 
It is a tacit rule of the language to make the frame or 
skeleton of Saxon words, and, when elevation or orna- 
ment is sought, to interweave Uoman ; but sparingly ; 
nor is a sentence made of lloman words alone, Avithout 
loss of strength. The children and laborers use the Saxon 
nnmixed. The Latin unmixed is abandoned to the col- 
leges and Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the Eng- 
lish island; and, in their dialect, the male principle is 
the Saxon; the female, the Latin; and they are com- 
bined in every discourse. A good writer, if he has in- 
dulged in a lloman roundness, makes haste to chasten and 
nerve his period by English monosyllables. 



LITERATURE. 179 

When tlie Golliic nations came into Europe, they 
fonnd it liglited with the sun and moon of Hebrew and 
of Greek genius. The tablets of their brain, long ke|)t 
in the dark, were finely sensible to the double glory. To 
tiie images from this twin source (of Christianity and art), 
tlie mind became fruitful as by the incubation of the Holy 
Ghost. The English mind flowered in every faculty. 
The common-sense was surprised and inspired. For two 
centuries, England was piiilosophic, religious, poetic, 
Tlie mental furniture seemed of larger scale ; the memory 
capacious like the storehouse of the rains. The ardor and 
endurance of study; the boldness and facility of their 
mental construction; their fency, and imagination, and 
easy spanning of vast distances of thought; the enter- 
prise or accosting of new subjects ; and, generally, the 
easy exertion of power, astonish, like the legendary feats 
of Guy of Warwick. The union of Saxon precision and 
Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the perfect 
example, is shared in less degree by the writers of two 
centuries. I find not only the great masters out of all 
rivalry and reach, but the whole writing of the time 
charged with a nuisculine force and freedom. 

There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor, and close- 
ness to the matter in hand, even in the second and third 
class of writers ; and, I think, in the common style of 
the people, as one finds it in the citation of wills, letters, 
and public documents, in proverbs, and forms of speech. 
Tiie more hearty and sturdy expression may indicate 
that the savageness of the Norseman was not all gone. 
Their dynamic brains hurled oif their words, as the revolv- 
ing stone hurls off scraps of grit. I could cite from the 



180 ENGLISH THATTS. 

seveiiteentli century sentences and phrases of edge not to 
be matched in tlie nineteenth. Their poets by simple 
force of mind equahzed themselves with the accumulated 
science of ours. The country gentlemen had a posset or 
drink they called October ; and the poets, as if by this 
hint, knew how to distil the whole season into their 
autumnal verses: and, as nature, to pique the more, 
sometimes works up deformities into beauty, in some rare 
Aspasia, or Cleopatra ; and, as the Greek art wrought 
many a vase or column, in which too long, or too lithe, 
or nodes, or pits and flaws, are made a beauty of; so 
these were so quick and vital, that they could charm and 
enrich by mean and vulgar objects, 

A man must think that age well taught and thought- 
ful, by which masques and poems, like those of Ben 
Jonson, full of heroic sentiment in a manly style, were 
received with favor. The unique fact in literary history, 
the unsurprised reception of Shakspeare, — the recep- 
tion proved by his making his fortune ; and the apathy 
proved by the absence of all contemporary panegyric, — 
seems to demonstrate an elevation in the mind of the 
people. Judge of the splendor of a nation, by the insig- 
nificance of great individuals in it. The manner in which 
they learned Greek and Latin, before our modern facili- 
ties were yet ready, without dictionaries, grammars, or 
indexes, by lectures of a professor, followed by their own 
searchings, — required a more robust memory, and co- 
operation of all the faculties ; and their scholars, Cam- 
den, Usher, Selden, Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, 
Burton, Bentley, Brian Walton, acquired the solidity 
and method of engineers. 



LITERATURE. 181 

The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. 
Their minds loved anah3gy; were cognizant of resem- 
blances, and climbers on the staircase of unity. 'T is a 
very old strife between those who elect to see identity, 
and those who elect to see discrepancies ; and it renews 
itself in Britain, The poets, of course, are of one part ; 
the men of the world, of the other. But Britain had 
many disciples of Plato, — More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, 
Lord Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spenser, Chap- 
man, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berkeley, Jere- 
my Taylor. 

Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries 
of observations, on useful science, and his experiments, 
I suppose, were worth nothing. One hint of Pranklin, 
or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a 
talent for experiment, was worth all his lifetime of 
exquisite trifles. But he drinks of a diviner stream, and 
marks the influx of idealism into England. Where that 
goes, is poetry, health, and progress. The rules of its 
genesis or its diffusion are not known. That knowledge, 
if we had it, would supersede all we call science of the 
mind. It seems an affair of race, or of meta-chemis- 
try ; — the vital point being, — how far the sense of 
unity, or instinct of seeking resemblances predominated. 
For, wherever the mind takes a step, it is, to put itself at 
one with a larger class, discerned beyond the lesser class 
with which it has been conversant. Hence, all poetry, 
and all affirmative action comes. 

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the anal- 
ogists, of the idealists, or (as we popularly say, naming 
from tlic best example) Platonists. Whoever discredits 



182 ENGLISH TUAITS. 

analogy, and requires heaps of facts, before any theories 
can be attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing 
original or beautiful will be produced by him. Locke 
is as surely the influx of decouiposition and of prose, as 
Bacon and the Platouists, of growth. The Platonic is 
the poetic tendency ; the so-called scientific is the nega- 
tive and poisonous. 'T is quite certain, that Spenser, 
Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth will be Platonists ; and 
that the dull men will be Lockists. Then pohtics and 
commerce will absorb from the educated class men of 
talents without genius, precisely because such have no 
resistance. 

Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, required 
in his map of the mind, first of all, universality, or prima 
'philosophia, the receptacle for all such profitable observa- 
tions and axioms as fall not within the compass of any 
of the special parts of philosophy, but are more common, 
and of a higher stage. He held this element essential : 
it is never out of mind : he never spares rebukes for 
such as neglect it ; believing that no perfect discovery 
can be made in a flat or level, but you must ascend to a 
higher science. "If any man thinketh philosophy and 
universality to be idle studies, he does not consider that 
all professions are from thence served and supplied ; and 
this I take to be a great cause that has hindered the pro- 
gression of learning, because these fundamental knowl- 
edges liave been studied but in passage." He explained 
himself by giving various quaint examples of the sum- 
mary or common laws, of which each science has its own 
illustration. He complains, that " he finds this part of 
learning very deficient, the profoundcr sort of wits draw- 



LITERATUUE. 183 

ing a bucket now and tlien for their own use, bnt the 
sprhig-liead unvisited. This was the dr)/ light which did 
scorch and offend most men's watery natures." Plato had 
signified tlie same sense, when he said : " All the great 
arts require a subtle and speculative research into the 
law of nature, since loftiness of thought and perfect 
mastery over every subject seem to be derived from 
some such source as this. This Pericles had, in addi- 
tion to a great natural genius. For, meeting with Anax- 
agoras, who was a person of this kind, he attached him- 
self to him, and nourished himself with sublime specula- 
tions on the absolute intelligence ; and imported thence 
into the oratorical art whatever could be useful to it." 

A few generalizations always circulate in the world, 
whose authors we do not rightly know, which astonish, 
and appear to be avenues to vast kingdoms of thought, 
and these are in the world constants, like the Copernican 
and Newtonian theories in pliysics. In England, these 
may be traced usually to Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or 
Hooker, even to Van Helniont and Belimen, and do all 
have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks. 
Of this kind is Lord Bacon's sentence, that "Nature is 
commanded by obeying her " ; his doctrine of poetry, 
which "accommodates the shows of things to the desires 
of the mind " ; or the Zoroastrian definition of poetry, 
mystical, yet exact, " apparent pictures of unapparent 
natures " ; Spenser's creed, that " soul is form, and doth 
the body make " ; the theory of Berkeley, that we have 
no certain assurance of the existence of matter ; Doctor 
Samuel Clarke's argument for theism from the nature of 
space and time; Harrington's political rule, that power 



184 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

nmst rest on land, — a rule whicli reqnircs to be liberally 
interpreted ; tlie theory of Swedenborg, so cosniically 
applied by him, that the man makes his heaven and hell ; 
Hegel's study of civil history, as the conflict of ideas and 
the victory of the deeper tiiought ; the identity-philosophy 
of Schelliug, couched in the statement that "all differ- 
ence is quantitative." So the very announcement of the 
theory of gravitation, of Kepler's threo' harmonic laws, 
and even of Dalton's doctrine of definite proportions, 
finds a sudden response in tlie mind, whicli remains a 
superior evidence to empirical demonstrations. I cite 
these generalizations, some of which are more recent, 
merely to indicate a class. Not these particulars, but 
the mental plane or the atmosphere from which they 
emanate, was the home and element of the writers and 
readers in what we loosely call the Elizabsthan age (say 
in literary history, the period from 1575 to 1625), yet 
a period almost short enough to justify Ben Jonson's 
remark on Lord Bacon : " About his time, and within 
his view, were born all the wits that could honor a 
nation, or help study." 

Such richness of genius had not existed more than once 
before. These heights could not be maintained. As we 
find stumps of vast trees in our exhausted soils, and have 
received traditions of their ancient fertility to tillage, so 
history reckons epochs in which the intellect of famed 
races became effete. So it fared with English genius. 
These heights were followed by a meanness, and a de- 
scent of the mind into lower levels ; the loss of wings ; 
no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of 
ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and 



LITERATURE. 185 

his "understanding" the measure, in all nations, of the 
English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty 
sides of Parnassus, on which they had once Avalked with 
echoing steps, and disused the studies once so beloved ; 
the powers of thought fell into neglect. The later Eng. 
lish want the faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of groupuig 
men in natural classes by an insight of general laws, so 
deep, that the rule is deduced with equal precision from 
f3w subjects or from one, as from multitudes of lives. 
Shakspcare is supreme in that, as in all the great mental 
energies. The Gormans g3iieralize : the English cannot 
interpret the German mind. German science compre- 
hends the English. The absence of the faculty in 
England is shown by the timidity which accumulates 
mountains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of 
men and miles of redoubts, to compensate the inspira- 
tions of courage and conduct. 

The English shrink from a generalization. " They do 
not look abroad into universality, or they draw only a 
bucketful at the fountain of the Eirst Philosophy for 
their occasion, and do not go to the spring-head." 
Bacon, who said this, is almost unique among his coun- 
trymen in that faculty, at least among the prose-writers. 
Milton, who was the stair or high table-land to let down 
the English genius from the summits of Shaksp^are, used 
this privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely in prose. 
For a long interval afterwards, it is not found. Burke 
was addicted to generalizing, but his was a shorter line ; 
as his thoughts have less depth, they have less compass. 
Hume's abstractions are not deep or wise. He owes his 
fame to one keen observation, that no copula had been 



18G ENGLISH TRAITS. 

detected between any cause and effect, either in physics 
or in thought ; tliat the term cause and effect was loosely 
or gratuitously applied to what we know only as consecu- 
tive, not at all as causal. Dr. Johnson's written abstrac- 
tions have little value : the tone of feeling in them makes 
their chief worth. 

Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has written 
the history of European literature for three centuries, — 
a performance of great ambition, inasmuch as a judgment 
was to be attempted on every book. But his eye does 
not reach to the ideal standards; the verdicts are all 
dated from London : all new thought must be cast into 
the old moulds. The exj)ausive element which creates 
literature is steadily denied. Plato is resisted, and his 
school. Hallam is uniforndy polite, but M^ith deficient 
sympathy ; writes with resolute generosity, but is uncon- 
scious of the deep worth which lies in the mystics, and 
which often outvalues as a seed of power and a source of 
revolution all the correct writers and shining reputations 
of their day. He passes in silence, or dismisses with a 
kind of contempt, the profounder masters : a lover of 
ideas is not only uncongenial, but unintelligible. Hallam 
inspires respect by his knowledge and fidelity, by his 
manifest love of 'good books, and he lifts himself to own 
better than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare, and 
better than Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in Hal- 
lam, or in the firmer intellectual nerve of Mackintosh, one 
still finds the same type of English genius. It is wise 
and rich, but it lives on its capital. It is retrospective. 
How can it discern and hail the new forms that are loom- 
ing up on the horizon, — new and gigantic thoughts 



LITERATURE. 187 

wliicli cannot dress themselves out of any old wardrobe 
of the past ? 

The essays, the fiction, and tlie poetry of the day liave 
the like municipal limits. Dickens, with preternatural 
apprehension of the language of manners, and the varie- 
ties of street life, with pathos and laughter, with patriotic 
and still enlarging generosity, writes London tracts. He 
is a painter of English details, like Hogarth ; local and 
temporary in his tints and style, and local in his aims. 
Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional ability, is 
distinguished for Ills reverence of intellect as a temporal- 
ity, and appeals to the worldly ambition of the student. 
His romances tend to fan these low flames. Their novel- 
ists despair of the heart. Thackeray finds that God has 
made no allowance for the poor thing in his universe ; — 
more 's the pity, he thinks ; — but 't is not for us to be 
wiser : we must renounce ideals, and accept London, 

Tlie brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the 
English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches, 
that good means good to eat, good to wear, material 
commodity ; that the glory of modern philosophy is its 
direction on " fruit " ; to yield economical inventions ; 
and that its merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals. 
He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philos- 
ophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentan- 
gling the intellect from theories of the all-Eair and all- 
Good, and pinning it down to the making a better 
sick-chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid ; — this 
not ironically, but in good faith ; — that, " solid advan- 
tage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is 
the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the 



188 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

better navigation it creates to enable tlie fruit-sliips to 
bring home tLeir lemons and wine to the London grocer. 
It was a curious result, in which the civility and religion 
of England for a thousand years ends in denying morals, 
and reducing the intellect to a saucepan. The critic 
hides his scepticism under the English cant of practical. 
To convince the reason, to touch the conscience, is ro- 
mantic pretension. The fine arts fall to the ground. 
Beauty, except as luxurious commodity, does not exist. 
It is very certain, I may say in passing, that if Lord 
Bacon had been only the sensuahst his critic pretends, 
he would never have acquired the fame which now en- 
titles him to this patronage. It is because he had im- 
agination, the leisures of the spirit, and basked in an 
element of contemplation out of all modern English 
atmospheric gauges, that he is impressive to the imagi- 
nations of men, and has become a potentate not to be 
ignored. Sir David Brewster sees the high place of 
Bacon, without finding Newton indebted to him, and 
thinks it a mistake. Bacon occupies it by specific grav- 
ity or levity, not by any feat he did, or by any tutoring 
more or less of Newton, etc., but an effect of the same 
cause which showed itself more pronounced afterwards 
in Hooke, Boyle, and Halley. 

Coleridge, a cathoHc mind, with a hunger for ideas, 
with eyes looking before and after to the highest bards 
and sages, and who wrote and spoke the only high criti- 
cism in his time, is one of those who save England 
from the reproach of no longer possessing the capacity 
to appreciate what rarest wit the island has yielded. 
Yet the misfortune of his life, his vast attempts but most 



LITERATURE. 189 

inadequate performiugs, failing to accomplisli any one 
masterpiece, seems to mark the closing of an era. Even 
in liim, the traditional Englishman was too strong for 
the philosopher, and he fell into accommodations : and, 
as Burke had striven to idealize the English State, so 
Coleridge ' narrowed his mind ' in the attempt to recon- 
cile the Gothic rule and dogma of the Anglican Church, 
with eternal ideas. But for Coleridge, and a lurking 
taciturn minority, uttering itself in occasional criticism, 
oftener in private discourse, one would say, that in 
Germany and in America is the best mind in England 
rightly respected. It is the surest sign of national decay, 
when the Bramins can no longer read or understand the 
Braminical philosophy. 

In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed all 
this materialism, Carlyle was driven by his disgust at the 
])ettiness and the cant, into the preaching of Fate. In 
comparison with all this rottenness, any check, any 
cleansing, though by fire, seemed desirable and beautiful. 
He saw little difference in the gladiators, or the "causes" 
for which they combated ; the one comfort was, that they 
were all going speedily into the abyss together. And 
liis imagination, finding no nutriment in any creation, 
avenged itself by celebrating the majestic beauty of the 
laws of decay. The necessities of mental structure force 
all minds into a few categories, and where impatience of 
the tricks of men makes Nemesis amiable, and builds 
altars to the negative Deity, the inevitable recoil is to 
heroism or the gallantry of the private heart, which 
decks its immolation with glory, in the unequal combat 
of will against fate. 



190 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of 
Tourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought 
to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigor, with a 
catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest at- 
tempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible 
knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long 
Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and 
only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a 
manifest centrality. If his mind does not rest in immov- 
able biases, perhaps the orbit is larger, and the return is 
not yet : but a master should inspire a confidence that 
he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present 
studies always the same high place. 

It would be easy to add exceptions to the limitary tone 
of English thought, and much more easy to adduce ex- 
amples of excellence in particular veins ; and if, going 
out of the region of dogma, we pass into that of general 
culture, there is no end to the graces and amenities, wit, 
sensibility, and erudition, of the learned class. But the 
artificial succor which marks all English performance, 
appears in letters also : much of their aesthetic produc- 
tion is antiquarian and manufactured, and literary repu- 
tations have been achieved by forcible men, whose 
relation to literature was purely accidental, but who 
were driven by tastes and modes they found in vogue 
into their several careers. So, at this moment, every 
ambitious young man studies geology; so members of 
Parliament are made, and churchmen. 

The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted 
on the national mind. They are incapable of an inutility, 
and respect the five mechanic powers even in their song. 



LITERATURE. 191 

Tlie voice of tlieir modem muse has a sliglit hint of the 
steam-whistle, and tlie poem is created as an ornament 
and finish of their monarcliy, and by no means as the 
bird of a new morning wiiich forgets the past world in 
the full enjoyment of that wliich is forming. They are 
with difficulty ideal ; they are the most conditioned men, 
as if, having the best conditions, they could not bring 
tliemselves to forfeit them. Every one of them is a 
thousand years old, and lives by his memory ; and when 
yon say this, they accept it as praise. 

Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, 
statistics, tabulation, and engineering, and even what is 
called philoso|)hy and letters is mechanical in its struc- 
ture, as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no 
religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed 
any more. The tone of colleges and of scholars and of 
literary society has this mortal air. I seem to walk on 
a marble floor, where nothing will grow. They exert 
every variety of talent on a lower ground, and may be 
said to live and act in a sub-mind. They have lost all 
commanding views in literature, philosophy, and science. 
A good Englishman shuts himself out of three fourths 
of his mind, and confines himself to one fourth. He has 
learning, good sense, power of labor, and logic : but a 
faith in the laws of the mind like that of Archimedes ; a 
belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must 
follow and not lead the laws of the mind ; a devotion to 
the theory of politics, like that of Hooker, and Milton, 
and Harrington, the modern English mind repudiates. 

I fear the same fault lies in their science, since they 
have known how to make it repulsive, and bereave nature 



192 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

of its charm ; — tliough perhaps the complahit flies wider, 
and the vice attaches to many more than to Britisli pliysi- 
cists. The eye of the naturalist must have a scope Hke 
nature itself, a susceptibility to all impressions, alive to 
the heart as well as to the logic of creation. But Eng- 
lish science puis humanity to the door. It wants the 
connection which is the test of genius. The science is 
false by not being poetic. It isolates the reptile or mol- 
lusk it assumes to explain ; whilst reptile or mollusk only 
exists in system, in relation. The poet only sees it as an 
inevitable step in the path of the Creator. But, in Eng- 
land, one hermit finds this fact, and another finds that, 
and lives and dies ignorant of its value. There are great 
exceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas ; perhaps of 
Robert Brown, the botanist ; and of Richard Owen, who 
has imported into Britain the German homologies, and 
enriched science with contributions of his own, adding 
sometimes the divination of the old masters to the un- 
broken power of labor in the English mind. But for the 
most part, the natural science in England is out of its 
loyal alliance with morals, and is as void of imagination 
and free play of thouglit, as conveyancing. It stands in 
strong contrast with the genius of the Germans, those 
semi-Greeks, who love analogy, and, by means of their 
lieight of view, preserve their enthusiasm, and think for 
Europe. 

No hope, no sublime augury, cheers the student, no 
secure striding from experiment onward to a foreseen law, 
but only a casual dipping here and there, like diggers in 
California " prospecting for a placer " tliat will pay. A 
horizon of brass of the diameter of his umbrella shuts 



LITERATURE. 193 

down around liis senses. Squalid contentment vr'ith con- 
ventions, satire at the names of philosopliy and religion, 
parochial and shop-till politics, and idolatry of usage, 
betray the ebb of life and spirit. As they trample on 
nationalities to reproduce London and Londoners in 
Europe and Asia, so they fear the hostility of ideas, of 
poetry, of religion, — ghosts which they cannot lay ; and, 
having attempted to domesticate and dress the Blessed 
Soul itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, they are 
tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that will 
sweep their system away. The artists say, " Nature puts 
us out " ; the scholars have become un-ideal. They parry 
earnest speech with banter and levity; they laugh you 
down, or they change the subject. " The fact is," say 
they over their wine, " all that about liberty, and so forth, 
is gone by ; it won't do any longer." The practical and 
comfortable oppress them with inexorable claims, and the 
smallest fraction of power remains for heroism and poetry. 
No poet dares murmur of beauty out of the precinct of 
his rhymes. No priest dares hint at a Providence which 
does not respect English utility. Tlie island is a roaring- 
volcano of fate, of material values, of tariffs, and laws of 
repression, glutted markets and low prices. 

Li the absence of the highest aims, of the pure love of 
knowledge, and the surrender to nature, there is the 
suppression of the imagination, the priapism of the 
senses and the understanding ; we have the factitious 
instead of the natural ; tasteless expense, arts of comfort, 
and the rewarding as an illustrious inventor whosoever 
will contrive one impediment more to interpose between 
the man and his objects. 

9 M 



194 ENGLISH THAITS. 

Thus poetry is degraded, and made ornamental. Pope 
and liis school wrote poetry fit to put round frosted 
cake. What did Walter Scott write without stint ? a 
rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland. And the libraries 
of verses they print have this Birmingham character. 
How many volumes of well-bred metre we must jingle 
through, before we can be filled, taught, renewed ! We 
want the miraculous ; the beauty which we can manufac- 
ture at no mill, — can give no account of ; the beauty of 
which Chaucer and Chapman had the secret. The poetry 
of course is low and prosaic ; only now and then, as in 
Wordsworth, conscientious ; or in Byron, passional ; or 
in Tennyson, factitious. But if I should count the poets 
who have contributed to the Bible of existing England 
sentences of guidance and consolation which are still 
glowiug and etfective, — iiow few ! Sliall I find my 
heavenly bread in tlie reigning poets ? Where is great 
design in modern English poetry? The English have 
lost sight of the fact that poetry exists to speak the 
spiritual law, and that no wealth of description or of 
fancy is yet essentially new, and out of the limits of 
prose, until this condition is reached. Therefore the 
grave old poets, like the Greek artists, heeded their 
designs, and less considered the finish. It was their 
office to lead to the divine sources, out of which all this, 
and much more, readily springs ; and, if this religion is 
in the poetry, it raises us to some purpose, and we can 
well afford some staidness, or hardness, or want of pop- 
ular tune m the verses. 

The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of 
Wordsworth. He had no master but nature and soli- 



LITERATURE. 195 

tude. " He wrote a poem," says Landor, " without the 
aid of war." His verse is the voice of sanity in a 
worldly and ambitious age. One regrets that his tem- 
perament was not more liquid and musical. He has 
written longer than he was inspired. But for the rest, 
he has no competitor. 

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Words- 
worth wanted. There is no finer ear than Tennyson's, 
nor more command of the keys of language. Color, like 
the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pencil, in 
waves so rich that we do not miss the central form. 
.Through all his refinements, too, he has reached the 
public, — a certificate of good sense and general power, 
since he who aspires to be the English poet must be as 
large as London, not in the same kind as London, but in 
his own kind. - But he wants a subject, and climbs no 
mount of vision to bring its secrets to the people. He 
contents himself with describing the Englishman as he is, 
and proposes no better. There are all degrees in poetry, 
and we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But 
it is only a first success, when the ear is gained. Tlie 
best office of the best poets has been to show how low 
and uninspired was tlieir general style, and that only 
once or twice they have struck the high chord. 

That expansiveness whicii is the essence of the poetic 
element, they have not. It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, 
who said: "Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink 
wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into 
new forms." A stanza of the song of nature the Ox- 
onian has no ear for, and he does not value the salient 
and curative influence of intellectual action, studious of 
truth, without a by-end. 



196 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistilDle taste 
for Orientalism in Britain. For a self-conceited modish 
life, made up of trifles, clinging to a corporeal civiliza- 
tion, hating ideas, there is no remedy like tlie Oriental 
largeness. That astonishes and disconcerts Enghsh 
decorum. Tor once there is thunder it never heard, 
light it never saw, and power which trifles with time 
and space. I am not surprised, then, to find an English- 
man like Warren Hastings, who had been struck with 
the grand style of thinking in the Indian writings, dep- 
recating the prejudices of liis countrymen, while offer- 
ing them a translation of the Bhagvat. " Might I," he 
says, "an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds 
to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in estimat- 
ing the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from 
the ancient or modern literature of Europe, all references 
to such sentiments or manners as are become the stand- 
ards of pr.ipriety for opinion and action in our own 
modes, and, equall}^ all appeals to our revealed tenets, 
of religion and moral duty." * He goes on to bespeak 
indulgence to "ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste, 
and passages elevated to a tract of sublimity into wliich 
our habits of judgment will find it difficidt to pursue 
them." 

Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies in tlie 
English race, which seems to make any recoil possible ; 
in other words, there is at all times a minority of pro- 
found minds existing in the nation, capable of appreciat- 
ing every soaring of intellect and every hint of tendency. 
While the constructive talent seems dwarfed and superfi- 

* Preface to Wilkins's Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta. 



THE "TIMES." 197 

cial, the criticism is often in the noblest tone, and sug- 
gests the presence of the invisible gods. I can well 
believe what I have often heard, that there are two na- 
tions in England ; but it is not the Poor and the Rich ; 
nor is it the Normans and Saxons ; nor the Celt and the 
Goth. These are each always becoming the other ; for 
E-obert Owen does not exaggerate the power of circum- 
stance. But the two complexions, or two styles of mind, 
— the perceptive class, and the practical finality class, — 
are ever in counterpoise, interacting mutually ; one, in 
hopeless minorities ; the other, in huge masses ; one studi- 
ous, contemplative, experimenting ; the other, the un- 
grateful pupil, scornful of the source, whilst availing itself 
of the knowledge for gain ; these two nations, of genius 
and of animal force, though the first consist of only a 
dozen souls, and the second of twenty millions, forever 
by their discord and their accord yield the power of the 
Eudish State. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE "TIMES." 

The power of the newspaper is familiar in America, 
and in accordance with our political system. In Eng- 
land, it stands in antagonism with the feudal institutions, 
and it is all the more beneficent succor against the secre- 
tive tendencies of a monarchy. The celebrated Lord 
Somers " knew of no good law proposed and passed in 
his time, to which the public papers had not directed his 
attention." There is no corner and no night. A relent- 



198 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

less inquisition drags every secret to the da^^ turns the 
glare of this solar microscope on every malfaisanee, so 
as to make the ])ublic a more terrible spy than any for- 
eigner ; and no weakness can be taken advantage of by 
an enemy, since the whole people are already forewarned. 
Thus England rids herself of those incrustations which 
have been the ruin of old states. Of course, this inspec- 
tion is feared. No antique privilege, no comfortable 
monopoly, but sees surely that its days are counted ; the 
j)eople are familiarized with the reason of reform, and, 
one by one, take away every argument of the obstruc- 
tives. " So your Grace likes the comfort of reading the 
newspapers," said Lord Mansfield to the Duke of North- 
umberland ; " mark my M^ords ; you and 1 shall not Hve to 
see it, but this young gentleman (Lord Eldon) may, or 
it may be a little later; but a little sooner or later, these 
newspapers will most assuredly write the dukes of Nor- 
thumberland out of their titles and possessions, and the 
country out of its king." The tendency in England 
towards social and political institutions like those of 
America, is inevitable, and the ability of its journals is 
the driving force. 

England is full of manly, clever, well-bred men who 
possess the talent of writing oif-hand pungent para- 
graphs, expressing with clearness and courage their opin- 
ion on any person or performance. Valuable or not, it 
is a skill that is rarely found, out of the English journals. 
The English do this, as they write poetry, as they ride 
and box, by being educated to it. Hundreds of clever 
Praeds, and Freres, and Frondes, and Hoods, and Hooks, 
and Maginns, and Mills, and Macaulays, make poems, or 



THE "TIMES." 199 

short essays for a journal, as they make speeches in Par- 
liament and on the hustings, or, as tliey shoot and ride. 
It is a quite accidental and arbitrary direction of their 
general ability. Rude health and spirits, an Oxford edu- 
cation, and tlie habits of society are implied, but not a 
ray of genius. It comes of the crowded state of the 
professions, the violent interest which all men take in 
politics, the facility of experimenting in the journals, and 
high pay. 

The most conspicuous result of this talent is the 
*' Times " newspaper. No power in England is more 
felt, more feared, or more obeyed. What you read in 
the morning in that journal, you shall hear in the even- 
ing in all society. It has ears everywhere, and its infor- 
mation is earliest, completest, and surest. It has risen, 
year by year, and victory by victory, to its present au- 
thority. I asked one of its old contributors, whether it 
liad once been abler than it is now. " Never," he said ; 
*' these are its palmiest days." It has shown those quali- 
ties which are dear to Englishmen, unflinching adher- 
ence to its objects, prodigal intellectual ability, and a 
towering assurance, backed by the perfect organization 
in its printing-house, and its world-wide network of 
correspondence and reports. It has its own history 
and famous trophies. In 1820, it adopted the cause of 
Queen Caroline, and carried it against the king. It 
adopted a poor-law system, and almost alone lifted it 
through. When Lord Brougham was in power, it de- 
cided against him, and pulled him down. It declared 
war against Ireland, and conquered it. It adopted the 
League against the Corn Laws, and, when Cobdcu had 



200 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

begun to despair, it announced his triumpli. It de- 
nounced and discredited tlie French Republic of 1848, 
and checked every sympathy with it in Eiighmd, until 
it had enrolled 200,000 special constables to watch the 
Ciiartists, and make them ridiculous on the 10th April. 
It first denounced and then adopted tlie new French 
Empire, and urged the French Alliance and its results. 
It has entered into each municipal, literary, and social 
question, almost with a controlling voice. It has done 
bold and seasonable service in exposing frauds which 
threatened the commercial community. Meantime, it 
attacks its rivals by perfecting its printing machinery, 
and will drive them out of circulation ; for the only limit 
to the circulation of the "Times " is the impossibility of 
printing copies fast enough ; since a daily paper can only 
be new and seasonable for a few hours. It will kill all 
but that paper which is diametrically in opposition ; since 
many papers, first and last, have lived by their attacks on 
the leading journal. 

The late Mr. Walter was printer of the " Times," and 
had gradually arranged the whole materiel of it in per- 
fect system. It is told, that when he demanded a small 
share in the proprietary, and was refused, he said, " As 
you please, gentlemen ; and you may take away the 
' Times ' from this office when you will ; I shall publish 
the 'New Times' next Monday morning." The propri- 
etors, who had already complained that his charges for 
printing were excessive, found that they were in his 
power, and gave him whatever he wished. 

I went one day with a good friend to the ''Times " 
office, which was entered through a pretty garden-^^ard, 



THE "TIMES." 201 

ill Priiiting-House Square. We walked witli some cir- 
cumspection, as if we were entering a powder-mill ; but 
the door was opened by a mild old woman, and, by dint 
of some transmission of cards, we "were at last conducted 
into the parlor of Mr. Morris, a very gentle person, 
with no hostile appearances. The statistics are now 
quite out of date, but I remember he told us that the 
daily printing was then 35,000 copies ; that on the 1st 
March, 184S, the greatest number ever printed, — 54,000 
were issued ; that, since February, the daily circulation 
had increased by 8,000 copies. The old press they 
were then using printed five or six thousand sheets per 
hour; the new machine, for which they were then build- 
ing an engine, would print twelve thousand per hour. 
Our entertainer confided us to a courteous assistant to 
show us the establisliment, in which, I think, they em- 
ployed a hundred and twenty men. I remember, I saw 
the reporters' room, in which they redact their hasty 
stenographs, but the editor's room, and who is in it, I 
did not see, though I shared the curiosity of mankind 
respecting it. 

Tlie staff of the " Times " has always been made up 
of able men. Old Walter, Sterling, Bacon, Barnes, Al- 
siger, Horace Twiss, Jones Loyd, John Oxeuford, Mr. 
Mosely, Mr. Bailey, have contributed to its renown in 
their special departments. But it has never wanted the 
first pens for occasional assistance. Its private informa- 
tion is inexplicable, and recalls the stories of Fouche's 
police, whose omniscience made it believed that the Em- 
press Josephine must be in his pay. It has mercantile 
and political correspondents in every foreign city; and its 
9* 



20:i ENGLISH traits. 

expresses outrun the despatches of the government. One 
hears anecdotes of the rise of its servants, as of the func- 
tionaries of tlie India House. I was told of the dexterity 
of one of its reporters, who, fuiding himself, on one occa- 
sion, where the magistrates had strictly forbidden report- 
ers, put his hands into his coat-pocket, and with pencil 
in one hand, and tablet in the other, did his work. 

Tlie iniiuence of tliis journal is a recognized power in 
Europe, and, of course, none is more conscious of it 
than its conductors. The tone of its articles has often 
been the occasion of comment from the official organs of 
the continental courts, and sometimes tlie ground of 
diplomatic complaint. What would the " Times " say ? 
is a terror in Paris, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Copenhagen, 
and in Nepaul. Its consummate discretion and success 
exhibit tlie English skill of combination. The daily 
paper is tiie work of many hands, chiefly, it is said, of 
young men recently from the University, and perhaps 
reading law in chambers in London. Hence the aca- 
demic elegance, and classic allusion, which adorn its col- 
umns. Hence, too, the heat and gallantry of its onset. 
But the steadiness of tlie aim suggests the belief that 
this fire is directed and fed by older engineers ; as if per- 
sons of exact information, and with settled views of 
polic\% supplied the writers with the basis of fact, and 
the object to be attained, and availed themselves of 
their younger energy and eloquence to plead the cause. 
Both the council and the executive departments gain by 
this division. Of two men of equal ability, the one who 
does not write, but keeps his eye on the course of public 
affairs, will have the higher judicial wisdom. But the 



THE "TIMES." 203 

parts are kept in concert ; all the articles appear to pro- 
ceed from a single will. The " Times" never disapproves 
of what itself has said, or cripples itself by apology for 
the absence of the editor, or the indiscretion of him who 
held the pen. It speaks out bluff and bold, and sticks 
to what it says. It draws from any number of learned 
and skilful contributors ; but a more learned and skilful 
person supervises, corrects, and co-ordinates. Of this 
closet, the secret does not transpire. No writer is suf- 
fered to claim the authorship of any paper ; everything 
good, from whatever quarter, comes out editorially ; and 
tlius, by making the paper everything, and those who write 
it nothing, the character and the awe of the journal gain. 
The English like it for its complete information. A state- 
ment of fact in the " Times " is as reliable as a citation 
from Hansard. Then, they like its independence ; they 
do not know, when they take it up, what tlieir paper is 
going to say; but, above all, for the nationality and con- 
fidence of its tone. It thinks for them all ; it is their 
understanding and day's ideal daguerreotyped. When I 
see them reading its columns, they seem to me becoming 
every moment more British. It has the national courage, 
not rash and petulant, but considerate and determined. 
No dignity or wealth is a shield from its assault. It 
attacks a duke as readily as a policeman, and with the 
most provoking airs of condescension. It makes rude 
work with the Board of Admiralty. The Bench of 
Bishops is still less safe. One bishop fares badly for his 
rapacity, and another for his bigotry, and a third for his 
courtliness. It addresses occasionally a hint to majesty 
itself, and sometimes a hint which is taken. There is an 



204 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

air of freedom even in llieir advertising columns, wlilcli 
speaks well for England to a foreigner. On the days 
when I arrived in London in 1847, I read among the 
daily announcements, one offering a reward of fifty 
pounds to any person who would put a nobleman, de- 
scribed by name and title, late a member of Parliament, 
into any county jail in England, he having been con- 
victed of obtaining money under false pretences. 

Was never such arrogancy as the tone of this paper. 
Every slip of an Oxonian or Cantabrigian who writes his 
first leader assumes that we subdued the earth before Ave 
sat down to write this particular " Times." One would 
think the world was on its knees to the "Times " Office, 
for its daily breakfast. But this arrogance is calculated. 
Who would care for it, if it " surmised," or " dared to 
confess," or " ventured to predict," etc. ? No ; zV is so, 
and so it shall be. 

Tlie morality and patriotism of the "Times" claims 
only to be representative, and by no means ideal. It 
gives the argument, not of the majority, but of the com- 
manding class. Its editors know better than to defend 
Russia, or Austria, or English vested rights, on abstract 
grounds. But they give a voice to the class who, at the 
moment, take the lead; and they have an instinct for 
finding where the power now lies, which is eternally 
shifting its banks. Sympathizing with, and speaking for 
the class that rules the hour, yet, being apprised of every 
ground-swell, every Chartist resolution, every Church 
squabble, every strike in the mills, they detect the first 
tremblings of change. They watch tlie hard and bitter 
struggles of the authors of each liberal movement, year 



THE "TIMES." 205 

by year, — watching them only to taunt and obstruct 
tliem, — until, at last, when they see that these have 
established their fact, that power is on the point of pass- 
ing to them, they strike in, with the voice of a monarch, 
astonish those whom they succor, as much as those whom 
they desert, and make victory sure. Of course, the 
aspirants see that the " Times " is one of the goods of 
fortune, not to be won but by winning their cause. 

"Punch" is equally an expression of English good 
sense, as the " London Times." It is the comic version 
of the same sense. Many of its caricatures are equal to 
the best pamphlets, and will convey to the eye in an in- 
stant the popular view which was taken of each turn of 
public affairs. Its sketches are usually made by mas- 
terly hands, and sometimes with genius ; the delight of 
every class, because uniformly guided by that taste 
which is tyrannical in England. It is a new trait of the 
nineteenth century, that the wit and humor of England, 
as in Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold, Dickens, 
Thackeray, Hood, have taken the direction of humanity 
and freedom. 

The " Times," like every important institution, shows 
the way to a better. It is a living index of the colossal 
British power. Its existence honors the people who 
dare to print all they know, dare to know all the facts, 
and do not wish to be iiattered by hiding the extent of 
the public disaster. There is always safety in valor. I 
wish I could add, that this journal aspired to deserve the 
power it wields, by guidance of the public sentiment to 
the right. It is usually pretended, in Parliament and 
elsewhere, that the Englisli press has a high tone, — 



206 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

wliicli it lias not. It has an imperial tone, as of a pow- 
erful and independent nation. But as with other em- 
pires, its tone is prone to be official, and even officinal. 
The " Times" shares all the limitations of the governing 
classes, and wishes never to be in a minority. If only it 
dared to cleave to the right, to show the right to be the 
ojily expedient, and feed its batteries from the central 
heart of humanity, it might not have so many men of 
rank among its contributors, but genius would be its cor- 
dial and invincible ally ; it might now and then bear the 
brunt of formidable combinations, but no journal is ruined 
by wise courage. It would be the natural leader of Brit- 
ish reform ; its proud function, that of being the voice of 
Europe, the defender of the exile and patriot against 
despots, would be more effectually discharged ; it would 
have the authority which is claimed for that dream of 
good men not yet come to pass, an International Con- 
gress ; and the least of its victories would be to give to 
England a new millennium of beneficent power. 



CHAPTEE XVI. 

STONEHENGE. 

It had been agreed between my friend Mr. C. and 
me, that before I left England we should make an excur- 
sion together to Stonehenge, which neither of ns had 
seen ; and the project pleased my fancy with the double 
attraction of the monument and the companion. It 
seemed a bringing together of extreme points, to visit 



STONEHENGE. 207 

tlie oldest religious monument in Britain in company 
with lier latest thinker, and one whose influence may be 
traced in every contemporary book. I was glad to sum 
up a little my experiences, and to exchange a few reason- 
able words on the aspects of England, with a man on 
whose genius I set a very high value, and who had as 
much penetration, and as severe a theory of duty as any 
person in it. On Friday, 7th July, we took the South- 
western Railway through Hampshire to Salisbury, where 
we found a carriage to convey us to Amesbury. The 
fine weather and my friend's local knowledge of Hamp- 
shire, in which he is wont to spend a part of every 
summer, made the way short. There was much to say, 
too, of the travelling Americans, and their usual objects 
in London. 1 thouglit it natural that they sliould give 
some time to works of art collected here, which they 
cannot find at home, and a little to scientific clubs and 
museums, which, at this moment, make London very 
attractive. But my philosopher was not contented. 
Art and ' high art ' is a favorite target for his wit. 
" Yes, Kund is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller 
wasted a great deal of good time on it " : — and he thinks 
lie discovers that old Goethe found this out, and, in his 
later writings, changed his tone. As soon as men begin 
to talk of art, architecture, and antiquities, nothing good 
comes of it. He wishes to go through the British Mu- 
seum in silence, and tliinks a sincere man will see some- 
thing, and say nothing. In these days, he thought, it 
would become an arcliitect to consult only the grim ne- 
cessity, and say, ' I can build you a coffin for such dead 
persons as you are, and for sucli dead purposes as you 



208 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

have, but you shall have no ornament.' Tor the science, 
he had, if possible, even less tolerance, and compared 
the savans of Somerset House to the boy wlio asked 
Confucius " how many stars in the sky ? " Confucius 
replied, "he minded things near him"; then said the 
boy, " how many hairs are there in your eyebrows ? " 
Confucius said, "he didn't know and didn't care." 

Still speaking of the Americans, C. complained that 
they dislike the coldness and exclusiveness of the Eng- 
lish, and run away to France, and go with their country- 
men, and are amused, instead of manfully staying in 
London, and confronting Englishmen, and acquiring 
tlieir culture, who really have much to teach them. 

I told C. that I was easily dazzled, and was accus- 
tomed to concede readily all that an Englishman would 
ask ; I saw everywhere in the country proofs of sense 
and spirit, and success of every sort : I like the people : 
they are as good as they are handsome ; they have every- 
thing, and can do everything : but meantime, I surely 
know, that, as soon as I return to Massachusetts, 1 shall 
lapse at once into the feeling, which tlie geography of 
America inevitably inspires, that we play the game with 
immense advantage; that there and not here is the seat 
and centre of the Britisli race ; and that no skill or activ- 
ity can long compete with the prodigious natural advan- 
tages of that country, in the hands of the same race ; and 
that England, an old and exhausted island, must one day 
be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her 
children. But this was a proposition wliich no English- 
man of whatever condition can easily entertain. 

We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage 



STONEHENGE. 209 

to Amesbiiry, passing by Old Surum, a bare, treeless hill, 
once containing the town which sent two members to 
Parliament, — now, not a hut, — and, arriving at Ames- 
bury, stopped at the George Inn. After dinner, we 
waked to Salisbury Plain. On the broad downs, under 
the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing but 
Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs 
in the wide expanse, — Stonehenge and the barrows, 
which rose like green bosses about the plain, and a few 
hay-ricks. On the top of a mountain, the old temple 
would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few 
shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the plain, and a 
bagman drove along the road. It looked as if tlie wide 
margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple 
were accorded by the veneration of the British race to 
the old egg out of which all their ecclesiastical structures 
and history had proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular 
colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet, and enclos- 
ing a second and a third colonnade within. We walked 
round the stones, and clambered over them, to wont our- 
selves with their strange aspect and groupings, and 
found a nook sheltered from the wind among them, 
where C. lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see, that 
just this simplest of all simple structures — two upright 
stones and a lintel laid across — had long outstood all later 
churches, and all history, and were like what is most 
permanent on the face of the planet : these, and the bar- 
rows, — mere mounds (of which there are a hundred and 
sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge), 
like the same mound on the plain of Troy, which still 
makes good to the passing mariner on Hellespont, the 

N 



210 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

vaunt of Homer and tlie fame of Achilles. Within the 
enclosure grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, M'ild 
thyme, daisy, meadow-sweet, golden-rod, thistle, and the 
carpeting grass. Over us, larks were soaring and sing- 
ing, — as my friend said : " the larks which were hatched 
last year, and the wind which was hatched many thou- 
sand years ago." We counted and measured by paces 
the biggest stones, and soon knew as much as any man 
can suddenly know of the inscrutable temple. There are 
ninety-four stones, and there were once probably one 
hundred and sixty. The temple is circular, and uncov- 
ered, and the situation fixed astronomically ; — the grand 
entrances here, and at Abury, being placed exactly north- 
east, " as all the gates of the old cavern temples are." 
How came the stones here ? for these sarsens or Druid- 
ical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood. The 
sacrificial stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these 
blocks, that can resist the action of fire, and as I read in 
the books, must have been brought one hundred and fifty 
miles. 

On almost every stone we found the marks of the 
mineralogist's hammer and chisel. The nineteen smaller 
stones of the inner circle are of granite. I, who had 
just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum 
of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain 
that some cleverer elephants or mylodonta had borne off 
and laid these rocks one on another. Only the good 
beasts must have known liow to cut a well-wrought tenon 
and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the 
stones. The chief mystery is, that any mystery should 
Lave been allowed to settle on so remarkable a monu- 



STONEHENGE. 211 

ment, in a country on whicli all tlie muses have kept 
their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not 
yet too late to learn much more than is kuown of this 
structure. Some diligent Fellowes or Layard will arrive, 
stone by stone, at the whole history, by that exhaustive 
British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice 
of objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir 
Gaur to the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids, and uncov- 
ers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity of 
its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and 
recent; and, a thousand years hence, men wall thank 
this age for the accurate history it will yet eliminate. 
We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh 
look at the uncanny stones. The old sphinx put our 
petty differences of nationality out of sight. To these 
conscious stones we two pilgrims were alike known and 
near. We could equally well revere their old British 
meaning. My philosopher was subdued and gentle. In 
this quiet house of destiny, he happened to say, " I 
plant cypresses wherever I go, and if I am in search of 
pain, I cannot go wrong." The spot, the gray blocks, 
and their rude order, which refuses to be disposed of, 
suggested to him the flight of ages, and the succession 
of religions. The old times of England impress C. 
much ; he reads little, he says, in these last years, but 
^' Acta Sanctorum'' the fifty -three volumes of which are 
in the " London Library." He finds all English history 
therein. He can see, as he reads, the old saint of lona 
sitting there, and writing, a man to men. The Acta 
Sanctorum show plainly that the men of those times 
believed in God, and in the immortality of the soul, as 



212 ENGLISH TUAITS. 

their abbeys and cathedrals testify : now, even the puri- 
tanism is all gone. London is pagan. He fancied that 
greater men had lived in England than any of her 
writers ; and, in fact, about the time when those writers 
appeared, the last of tliese were already gone. 

We left the mound in the twilight, with the design to 
return the next morning, and coming back two miles to 
our inn, we were met by little showers, and late as it 
was, men and women were out attempting to protect 
their spread windrows. The grass grows rank and dark 
in the showery England. At the inn, there was only 
milk for one cup of tea. When we called for more, the 
girl brought us three drops. My friend was annoyed 
who stood for the credit of an English inn, and still 
more, the next morning, by the dog-cart, sole procurable 
vehicle, in which we were to be sent to Wilton. I en- 
gaged the local antiquary, Mr. Brown, to go wilh us to 
Stonehenge, on our way, and show us what he knew of 
the "astronomical" and " sacrificial " stones. I stood 
on the last, and he pointed to the upright, or rather, 
inclined stone, called the "astronomical," and bade me 
notice that its top ranged with the sky-line. " Yes." 
Very well. Now, at the summer solstice, the sun rises 
exactly over the top of that stone, and, at the Druidical 
temple at Abury, there is also an astronomical stone, in 
the same relative positions. 

In the silence of tradition, this one relation to science 
becomes an important clew; but we were content to 
leave the problem, with the rocks. Was this the 
" Giants' Dance " which Merlin brought from Killaraus, 
in Ireland, to be Uther Pendragon's monument to the 



STONEHENGE. 213 

British nobles whom Hengist slaughtered here, as Geof- 
frey of Monmouth relates ? or was it a Roman work, as 
luigo Jones explained to King James; or identical in 
design and style with the East Indian temples of the 
sun ; as Davies in the Celtic Researches maintains ? Of 
all the writers, Stukeley is the best. The heroic anti- 
quary, charmed with the geometric perfections of his 
ruin, connects it with the oldest monuments and religion 
of the world, and, with the courage of his tribe, does not 
stick to say, "the Deity who made the world by the 
scheme of Stonehenge." He finds that the cursus * on 
Salisbury Plain stretches across the downs, like a line of 
latitude upon the globe, and the meridian line of Stone- 
henge passes exactly through the middle of this cursus. 
But here is the high point of the theory : the Druids had 
the magnet; laid their courses by it ; their cardinal points 
in Stonehenge, Ambresbury, and elsewhere, which vary 
a little from true east and west, followed the variations 
of the compass. The Druids were Phoenicians. The 
name of the magnet is lapis Heracleus, and Hercules was 
the god of the Phoenicians. Hercules, in the legend, 
drew his bow at the sun, and the sun-god gave him a 
golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean. What 
was this, but a compass-box ? This cup or little boat, 

* Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue and a cur- 
sus. The avenue is a narrow road of raised earth, extending 
594 yards in a straight hne from the grand entrance, then 
dividing into two branches, which lead, severally, to a row of 
barrows : and to the cursus, — an artificially formed flat tract 
of ground. This is half a mile northeast from Stonehenge, 
bounded by banks and ditches, 3,036 yards long, by 110 broad. 



214 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

ill which the magnet was made to float on water, and so 
show the north, was probably its first form, before it was 
suspended on a pin. But science was an arcanum, and, 
as Britain was a Phoenician secret, so they kept their 
compass a secret, and it was lost with the Tyrian com- 
merce. The golden fleece, again, of Jason, was the 
compass, — a bit of loadstone, easily supposed to be the 
only one in the world, and therefore naturally awakening 
the cupidity and ambition of the young heroes of a mari- 
time nation to join in an expedition to obtain possession 
of this wise stone. Hence the fable that the ship Argo 
was loquacious and oracular. There is also some curious 
coincidence in the names, Apollodorus makes Magnes 
the son of jEoliis, who married Nais. On hints like 
these, Stukeley builds again the grand colonnade into 
liistoric harmony, and computing backward by the known 
variations of the compass, bravely assigns the year 406 
before Christ for tlie date of the temple. 

For the diificulty of handling and carrying stones of 
this size, the like is done in all cities, every day, with no 
other aid than horse-power. I chanced to see a year ago 
men at work on the substructure of a house in Bowdoin 
Square, in Boston, swinging a block of granite of the 
size of the largest of the Stonehenge columns with an 
ordinary derrick. The men were common masons, with 
paddies to help, nor did they think they were doing any- 
thing remarkable. I suppose there were as good men a 
thousand years ago. And we wonder how Stonehenge 
was built and forgotten. After spending half an hour 
on the spot, we set forth in our dog-cart over tbe downs 
for Wilton, C. not suppressing some threats and evil 



STONEHENGE. 215 

omens on the proprietors, for keeping tliese broad plains 
a wretched sheep-walk when so many thousands of Eng- 
lishmen were hungry and wanted labor. But I heard 
afterwards that it is not an economy to cultivate this 
land, which only yields one crop on being broken up, 
and is then spoiled. 

We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall, — the re- 
nowned seat of the Earls of Pembroke, a house known 
to Shakspeare and Massinger, the frequent home of Sir 
Philip Sidney, where he wrote the Arcadia; where he 
conversed with Lord Brooke, a man of deep thought, 
and a poet, who caused to be engraved on his tombstone, 
"Here lies Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, the friend of 
Sir Philip Sidney." It is now the property of the Earl 
of Pembroke, and the residence of his brother, Sidney 
Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble specimen of the 
English manor-hall. My friend had a letter from Mr. 
Herbert to his housekeeper, and the house was shown. 
The state drawing-room is a double cube, thirty feet 
high, by thirty wide, by sixty feet long : the adjoining 
room is a single cube, of thirty feet every way. Although 
these apartments and the long library were full of good 
family portraits, Vandykes and other ; and though there 
were some good pictures, and a quadrangle cloister full 
of antique and modern statuary, — to which C, catalogue 
in hand, did all too much justice, — yet the eye was still 
drawn to the windows, to a magnificent lawn, on which 
grew the finest cedars in England. I had not seen more 
charming grounds. We went out, and walked over tlie 
estate. We crossed a bridge built by Inigo Jones over a 
stream, of which the gardener did not know the name, 



216 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

{Qu. Alpli?) watched the deer; climbed to the lonely 
sculptured summer-house, on a hill backed by a wood ; 
came down into the Italian garden, and into a French 
pavilion, garnished with French busts ; and so, again to 
the house, where we found a table laid for us with bread, 
meats, peaches, grapes, and wine. 

On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for 
Salisbury. The Cathedral which was finished six hun- 
dred years ago has even a spruce and modern air, and its 
spire is the highest in England. I know not why, but I 
had been more struck with one of no fame at Coventry, 
which rises three hundred feet from the ground, with the 
lightness of a mullein-plant, and not at all implicated 
with the church. Salisbury is now esteemed the cul- 
mination of the Gothic art in England, as the buttresses 
are fully unmasked, and honestly detailed from the sides 
of the pile. The interior of the Cathedral is obstructed 
by the organ in the middle, acting like a screen. I know 
not why in real architecture the hunger of the eye for 
length of line is so rarely gratified. The rule of art is 
that a colonnade is more beautiful the longer it is, and 
that ad infinitum. And the nave of a church is seldom 
so long that it need be divided by a screen. 

We loitered in the church, outside the choir, whilst 
service was said. Whilst w^e listened to the organ, my 
friend remarked, the music is good and yet not quite 
religious, but somewhat as if a monk were panting to 
some fine Queen of Heaven. C. was unwilling, and we 
did not ask to have the choir shown us, but returned to 
our inn, after seeing another old church of the place. 
We passed in the train Clarendon Park, but could see 



STONEHENGE. 217 

little but the edge of a wood, though C. had wished to 
pay closer attention to the birthplace of the Decrees of 
Clarendon. At Bishopstoke we stopped, and found Mr. 
H., who received us in his carriage, and took us to his 
house at Bishops Waltham. 

On Sunday, we had much discourse on a very rainy 
day. My friends ask, whether there were any Ameri- 
cans ? — any with an American idea, — any theory of the 
right future of that country? Tims challenged, I be- 
thought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, neither 
of presidents nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of such as 
would make of America another Europe. I thought only 
of the simplest and purest minds ; I said, ' Certainly yes ; 
but those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which I 
should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to 
wliich it might be only ridiculous, — and yet it is the 
only true.' So I opened the dogma of no government 
and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and 
the fun, and procured a kind of liearing for it. I said, it 
is true that I have never seen in any country a man of 
sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain 
to me that no less valor than this can command my 
respect. I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar 
musket-worship, — though great men be musket-wor- 
shippers ; and 't is certain, as God liveth, the gun that 
does not need another gun, the law of love and justice 
alone, can effect a clean revolution. I fancied that one 
or two of my anecdotes made some impression on C, 
and I insisted that the manifest absurdity of the view to 
English feasibility could make no ditference to a gentle- 
man ; that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop 
10 



218 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and spiuage in London or in Boston, the soul miglifc 
quote Talleyrand, "Monsieur, je tCen vols pas la neces- 
site" * As I had thus taken in the conversation the 
saint's part, when dinner was announced, C. refused to 
go out before me, — " he was altogether too wicked." 
I planted my back against the wall, and our host wittily 
rescued us from the dilemma, by saying, he was the 
wickedest, and would walk out first, then C. followed, 
and I went last. 

On the way to Winchester, whither our host accom- 
panied us in the afternoon, my friends asked many ques- 
tions respecting American landscape, forests, houses, — 
my house, for example. It is not easy to answer these 
queries well. There I thouglit, in America, lies nature 
sleeping, overgrowing, almost conscious, too much by 
half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain 
tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests 
seen at night, steeped in dews and rains, which it loves; 
and on it man seems not able to make much impression. 
There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany 
pastures, in the sea- wide, sky -skirted prairie, still sleeps 
and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since 
driven aM^ay from the trim hedge-rows and over-culti- 
vated garden of England. And, in England, I am quite 
too sensible of this. Every one is on his good beliavior, 
and must be dressed for dinner at six. So I put off my 
friends with very inadequate details, as best I could. 

Just before entering Wincliester, we stopped at tlie 
Church of Saint Cross, and, after looking through the 
quaint antiquity, we demanded a piece of bread and a 

* " Mais, Monseigneur, il faut que j'existe." 



STONEHENGE. 219 

drauglit of beer, wliicli the founder, Henry de Blois, in 
1136, commanded should be given to every one who 
should ask it at the gate. We had both, from the old 
couple who take care of the church. Some twenty peo- 
ple, every day, they said, make tlie same demand, Tiiis 
hospitality of seven hundred years' standing did not hin- 
der C. from pronouncing a malediction on the priest who 
receives £ 2,000 a year, that were meant for the poor, 
and spends a pittance on this small-beer and crumbs. 

In the Cathedral, I was gratified, at least by the 
ample dimensions. The length of line exceeds that of 
any other English church ; being 556 feet by 250 in 
breadth of transept, I think I prefer this church to all 
I have seen, except Westminster and York. Here was 
Canute buried, and here Alfred the Great was crowned 
and buried, and here the Saxon kings : and, later, in 
his own church, William of Wykeham, It is very old : 
part of the crypt into which we went down and saw the 
Saxon and Norman arches of tiie old church on which 
the present stands, was built fourteen or fifteen hundred 
years ago. Sharon Turner says : " Alfred was buried at 
Winchester, in the Abbey he had founded there, but his 
remains were removed by Henry I. to the new Abbey in 
the meadows at Hyde, on the northern quarter of the 
city, and laid under the high altar. The building was 
destroyed at the Reformation, and what is left of Alfred's 
body now lies covered by modern buildings, or buried in 
the ruins of the old." * William of Wykeham's shrine 
tomb was unlocked for us, and C. took hold of the re- 
cumbent statue's marble hands, and patted them affec- 

* History of the Anglo-Saxons, I. 599. 



220 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

iiouatelj, for lie rightly values the brave man who built 
Windsor, and this Cathedral, and the School here, and 
New College at Oxford. But it was growing late in the 
afternoon. Slowly Ave left tlie old house, and parting 
with our host, we took the train for London. 



CHAPTER XYII. 

PERSONAL. 

In these comments on an old journey now revised 
after seven busy years have much changed men and 
things in England, I have abstained from reference to 
persons, except in the last chapter, and in one or two cases 
where the fame of the parties seemed to have given the 
public a property in all that concerned them. I must 
further allow myself a few notices, if only as an acknowl- 
edgment of debts that cannot be paid. My journeys 
were cheered by so much kindness from new friends, 
that my impression of the island is bright with agreeable 
memories both of public societies and of households; 
and, what is nowliere better found than in England, a 
cultivated person fitly surrounded by a happy home, 
"with honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," is of 
all institutions the best. At the landing in Liverpool, I 
found my Manchester correspondent awaiting me, a gen- 
tleman whose kind reception was followed by a train of 
friendly and effective attentions which never rested whilst 
I remained in the country. A man of sense and of letters, 
the editor of a powerful local journal, he added to solid 



PERSONAL. 221 

virtues an infinite sweetness and honhommie. There 
seemed a pool of honey about his heart which lubricated 
all his speech and action with fine jets of mead. An 
equal good-fortune attended many later accidents of my 
journey, until the sincerity of English kindness ceased to 
surprise. My visit fell in the fortunate days when Mr. 
Bancroft was the American Minister in London, and at 
his house, or through his good offices, I had easy access 
to excellent persons and to privileged places. At the 
house of Mr. Carlyle, I met persons eminent in society 
and in letters. The privileges of the Athenaeum and of 
the Hefonn Clubs were hospitably opened to me, and I 
found much advantage in the circles of the " Geologic," 
the "Antiquarian," and the " Royal Societies." Every 
day in London gave me new opportunities of meeting 
men and women who give splendor to society. I saw 
Rogers, Hallam, Macaulay, Milnes, Milman, Barry Corn- 
wall, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Leigh Hunt, 
D'Israeli, Helps, Wilkinson, Bailey, Kenyon, and Eors- 
ter : the younger poets, Clough, Arnold, and Patmore ; 
and, among the men of science, Robert Brown, Owen, 
Sedgwick, Paraday, Buckland, Lyell, De la Beche, 
Hooker, Carpenter, Babbage, and Edward Forbes. It 
was my privilege also to converse with Miss Baillie, with 
Lady Morgan, with Mrs. Jameson, and Mrs. Somerville. 
A finer hospitality made many private houses not less 
known and dear. It is not in distinguished circles that 
wisdom and elevated characters are usually found, or, if 
found, not confined thereto ; and my recollections of the 
best hours go back to private conversations in different 
parts of the kingdom, with persons little known. Nor 



222 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

am I insensible to the courtesy which frankly opened to 
me some uoble mansions, if I do not adorn my page with, 
their names. Among the privileges of London, I recall 
with pleasure two or three signal days, one at Kew, 
where Sir William Hooker showed me all the riches of 
the vast botanic garden ; one at the Museum, where Sir 
Charles Fellowes explained in detail the history of his 
Ionic trophy -monument ; and still another, on which Mr. 
Owen accompanied my countryman Mt. H. and myself 
through the Hunterian Museum. 

The like frank bospitality, bent on real service, I found 
among the great and the humble, wherever I went ; in 
Birmingham, in Oxford, in Leicester, in Nottingham, in 
Sheffield, in Manchester, in Liverpool. At Edinburgh, 
through the kindness of Dr. Samuel Brown, I made the 
acquaintance of De Quincey, of Lord Jeffrey, of Wilson, 
of Mrs. Crowe, of the Messrs. Chambers, and of a man of 
high character and genius, the short-lived painter David 
Scott. 

At Ambleside, in March, 1848, I was for a couple of 
days the guest of Miss Martineau, then newly returned 
from her Egyptian tour. On Sunday afternoon, I accom- 
panied her to Rydal Mount. And as I have recorded a 
visit to Wordsworth, many years before, I must not for- 
get this second interview. We found Mr. Wordsworth 
asleep on the sofa. He was at first silent and indisposed, 
as an old man, suddenly waked, before he had ended his 
nap ; but soon became full of talk on the French news. 
He was nationally bitter on the French-: bitter on Scotch- 
men, too. No Scotchman, he said, can write English. 
He detailed the two models, on one or the other of which 



PERSONAL. 



223 



all the sentences of the historian Robertson are framed. 
Nor could Jeffrey, nor the Eduiburgh Reviewers write 
English, nor can ... . who is a pest to the English 
tongue. Incidentally he added, Gibbon cannot write 
English. The M'mhiirrjh Reciew wrote what would tell 
and what would sell. It had however changed the tone 
of its literary criticism from the time when a certain letter 
was written to the editor by Coleridge. Mrs. W. had the 
Editor's answer in her possession. Tennyson he thinks 
a right poetic genius, though with some affectation. He 
had thought an elder brother of Tennyson at first the 
better poet, but must now reckon Alfred the true one. 
.... In speaking of I know not what style, he said, 
" To be sure it was the manner, but then you know the 
matter always comes out of the manner." •. . . . He 
thought Rio Janeiro the best place in the world for a 

great capital city We talked of English national 

character. I told him it was not creditable that no one 
in all the country knew anything of Thomas Taylor, the 
Platouist, whilst in every American library his translations 
are found. I said, if Plato's Republic were published in 
England as a new book to-day, do you think it would find 
any readers? — he confessed, it would not: "And yet," 
he added after a pause, with that complacency which 
never deserts a true-born Englishman, — " and yet we 
have embodied it all." 

His opinions of Erench, English, Irish, and Scotch 
seemed rashly formulized from little anecdotes of what 
had befallen himself and members of his family, in a dili- 
gence or stage-coach. His face sometimes lighted up, 
but his conversation was not marked by special force or 



224 ENGLISH THAITS. 

elevation. Yet perhaps it is a high compliment to the 
cultivation of tlie English generally, when we find such 
a man not distinguished. He had a healthy look, with a 
weather-beaten face, his face corrugated, especially the 
large nose. 

Miss Martineau, wlio lived near him, praised him to 
me, not for his poetry, hut for thrift and economy ; for 
having aiTorded to his country neighbors an example of a 
modest household, where comfort and culture were se- 
cured without any display. Sfie said, that, in his early 
housekeeping at the cottage where he first lived, he was 
accustomed to offer his friends b'read and plainest fare : 
if they wanted anything more, they must pay him for 
their board. It was the rule of the house. I replied, 
that it evinced English pluck more than any anecdote I 
knew. A gentleman in the neighborhood told the story 
of Walter Scott's once staying a AA^eek with Wordsworth, 
and slipping out every day under pretence of a walk, to 
the Swan Inn, for a cold cut and porter ; and one day 
passing with Wordsworth the inn, he was betrayed by 
the landlord's asking liim if he had come for his porter. 
Of course, this trait would have another look in London, 
and there you will hear from different literary men, that 
Wordsworth had no personal friend, that he was not 
amiable, that he was parsimonious, etc. Laudor, always 
generous, says that he never praised anybody. A gentle- 
man in London showed me a watch tliat once belonged 
to Milton, whose initials are engraved on its face. He 
said, he once showed this to Wordsworth, who took it in 
one hand, then drew out his own watch, and held it up 
with the other, before the company, but no one making 



RESULT. 225 

the expected remark, lie put back liis own in silence. I 
do not attach much importance to the disparagement of 
Wordsworth among London scholars. Who reads him 
well will know, that in following the strong bent of his 
genius, he was careless of the many, careless also of the 
few, self-assured that he should " create the taste by 
which he is to be enjoyed." He lived long enough to 
witness the revolution he liad wrought, and "to see what 
he foresaw," There are torpid places in his mind, there 
is something hard and sterile in his poetry, want of grace 
and variety, want of due catholicity and cosmopolitan 
scope : he had conformities to English politics and tradi- 
tions; he had egotistic puerilities in the choice and treat- 
ment of his subjects ; but let us say of him, that, alone 
in his time, he treated the human mind well, and with an 
absolute trust. His adherence to his poetic creed rested 
on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortality is the 
high-water mark whicli the intellect has reached in this 
age. New meaus were employed, and new realms added 
to the empire of the muse, by his courage. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

RESULT. 

England is the best of actual nations. It is no ideal 
framework, it is an old pile built in different ages, with 
repairs, additions, and makeshifts ; but you see the poor 
best you have got. London is the epitome of our times, 
and the Rome of to-day. Broad-fronted, broad-bottomed 
10* o 



226 ENGLISH TKAITS. 

Teutons, tliey stand in solid plialaux foursquare to the 
points of compass ; they constitute the modern world, 
they have earned their vantage-ground, and held it 
through ages of adverse possession. They are well 
marked and differing from other leading races. England 
is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is not so 
public in its bias; private life is its place of honor. 
Truth in private life, untruth in public, marks these 
home-loving men. Their political conduct is not decided 
by general views, but by internal intrigues and personal 
and family interest. They cannot readily see beyond 
England. The history of Rome and Greece, when writ- 
ten by their scholars, degenerates into English party 
pamphlets. They cannot see beyond England, nor in 
England can they transcend the interests of the govern- 
ing classes. " English principles " mean a primary re- 
gard to the interests of property. England, Scotland, 
and Ireland combine to check the colonies. England 
and Scotland combine to check Irish manufactures and 
trade. England rallies at home to check Scotland. In 
England, the strong classes check the weaker. In the 
home population of near thirty millions, there are but 
one million voters. The Church punishes dissent, pun- 
ishes education. Down to a late day, marriages performed 
by dissenters were illegal. A bitter class-legislation gives 
power to those who are rich enough to buy a law. The 
game-laws are a proverb of oppression. Pauperism in- 
crusts and clogs the state, and in hard times becomes 
hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was diluted. 
Multitudes lived miserably by shell-fish and sea-ware. 
In cities, the children are trained to beg, until they shall 



RESULT. 227 

be old enough to rob. Men and women were convicted 
of poisoning scores of children for burial fees. In Irish 
districts, men deteriorated in size and shape. The nose 
sunk, tlie gums were exposed, with diminished brain and 
brutal form. During the xiustralian emigration, multi- 
tudes were rejected by the commissioners as being too 
emaciated for useful colonists. During the Russian war, 
few of those that offered as recruits were found up to the 
medical standard, though it had been reduced. 

The foreign policy of England, though ambitious and 
lavish of money, has not often been generous or just. It 
has a principal regard to the interest of trade, checked 
however by the aristocratic bias of the ambassador, which 
usually puts him in sympathy with the continental Courts. 
It sanctioned the partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa, 
Sicily, Parga, Greece, Turkey, Rome, and Hungary. 

Some public regards they have. They have abolished 
slavery in the West Indies, and put an end to human 
sacrifices in the East. At home they have a certain 
statute hospitality. England keeps open doors, as a 
trading country must, to all nations. It is one of their 
fixed ideas, and wrathfully supported by their laws in 
unbroken sequence for a thousand years. In Magna 
Charta it was ordained, that all " merchants shall have 
safe and secure conduct to go out and come into Eng- 
land, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as 
by water, to buy and sell by the ancient allowed customs, 
without any evil toll, except in time of war, or when 
they shall be of any nation at war with us." It is a 
statute and obliged hospitality, and peremptorily main- 
tained. But this shop-rule had one magnificent effect. 



228 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

It extends its cold unalterable courtesy to political exiles 
of every opinion, and is a fact which might give addi- 
tional light to that portion of the planet seen from the 
farthest star. But this perfunctory hospitality puts no 
sweetness into their unaccommodating manners, no check 
on that puissant nationality which makes their existence 
incompatible with all that is not English. 

What we must say about a nation is a superficial deal- 
ing with symptoms. We cannot go deep enough into 
the biography of the spirit who never throws himself en- 
tire into one hero, but delegates his energy in parts or 
spasms to vicious and defective individuals. But the 
wealth of the source is seen in the plenitude of English 
nature. What variety of power and talent ; what facil- 
ity and plenteousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, 
royalty, loyalty; what a proud chivalry is indicated in 
" Collins's Peerage," through eight hundred years ! 
Wiiat dignity resting on what reality and stoutness ! 
What courage in war, what sinew in labor, what cunning 
workmen, wliat inventors and engineers, what seamen 
and pilots, what clerks and scholars ! No one man and 
no few men can represent them. It is a people of myriad 
personalities. Tlieir many-headedness is owing to the 
advantageous position of the middle class, who are always 
the source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty 
of their sesthetic production. As they are many-headed, 
so they are many-nationed ; their colonization annexes 
archipelagoes and continents, and their speech seems 
destined to be the universal language of men. I have 
noted the reserve of power in the English temperament. 
In the island, they never let out all the length of all the 



RESULT. 229 

reins, tliere is no Berserkir rage, no abandonment or 
ecstasy of will or intellect, like that of the Arabs in the 
time of Mahomet, or like that which intoxicated France in 
1789. Bat who would see the uncoiling of that tremen- 
dous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces, 
must follow the swarms which, pouring now for two hun- 
dred years from the British islands, have sailed, and 
rode, and traded, and planted, through all climates, 
mainly following the belt of empire, the temperate zojies, 
carrying the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and 
law, for arts and for thought, — acquiring under some 
skies a more electric energy than the native air allows, — 
to the conquest of the globe. Their colonial policy, 
obeying the necessities of a vast empire, has become lib- 
eral. Canada and Australia have been contented with 
substantial independence. They are expiating the wrongs 
of India, by benefits : first, in works for the irrigation of 
the peninsula, and roads and telegraphs ; and secondly, 
in the instruction of the people, to qualify them for self- 
government, when the British power shall be finally 
called home. 

Their mind is in a state of arrested development, — 
a divine cripple like Vulcan ; a blind savant like Ruber 
and Sanderson. They do not occupy themselves on 
matters of general and lasting import, but on a corporeal 
civilization, on goods that perish in the using. But they 
read with good intent, and what they learn they incar- 
nate. The English mind turns every abstraction it can 
receive into a portable utensil, or a working institution. 
Such is their tenacity, and such their practical turn, that 
they hold all they gain. Hence we say, that only the 



230 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

English race can be trusted with freedom, — freedom 
which is double-edged and dangerous to any but the 
wise and robust. The English designate the kingdoms 
emulous of free institutions as the sentimental nations. 
Their own culture is not an outside varnish, but is thor- 
ough and secular in families and the race. They are 
oppressive with their temperament, and all the more that 
they are refined. I have sometimes seen them walk with 
my countrymen, when I M-as forced to allow them every 
advantage, and their companions seemed bags of bones. 
There is cramp limitation in their habit of thought, 
sleepy routine, and a tortoise's instinct to hold hard to 
the ground with his claws, lest he should be thrown on 
his back. There is a drag of inertia which resists reform 
in every shape ; law-reform, army-reform, extension of 
^suffrage, Jewish franchise. Catholic emancipation, — the 
abolition of slavery, of impressment, penal code, and 
entails. They praise this drag, under the formula, that 
it is the excellence of the British constitution, that no 
law can anticipate the public opinion. These poor tor- 
toises must hold hard, for they feel no wings sprouting 
at their shoulders. Yet somewhat divine warms at their 
heart, and waits a happier hour. It hides in their sturdy 
will. "Will," said the old philosophy, "is the measure 
of power," and personality is the token of this race. 
Quid vult valde vult. What they do they do with a will. 
You cannot account for their success by their Chris- 
tianity, commerce, charter, common law. Parliament, or 
letters, but by the contumacious sharp-tongued energy 
of English nattirel, with a poise impossible to disturb, 
which makes all these its instruments. They are slow and 



RESULT. 231 

reticent, and are like a dull good horse which lets every 
nag pass him, but with whip and spur will run down 
every racer in the field. They are right in their feeUng, 
though wrong in their speculation. 

The feudal system survives in the steep inequahty of 
property and privilege, in the limited franchise, in the 
social barriers which confine patronage and promotion to 
a caste, and still more in the submissive ideas pervading 
these people. The fagging of the schools is repeated in 
the social classes. An Englishman shows no mercy to 
those below him in the social scale, as he looks for none 
from those above him ; any forbearance from his superiors 
surprises him, and they suffer in his good opinion. But 
the feudal system can be seen with less pain on large 
liistorical grounds. It was pleaded in mitigation of the 
rotten borough, that it worked well, that substantial jus- 
tice was done. Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, 
Sheridan, Rom illy, or whatever national men, were by 
tills means sent to Parliament, when their return by large 
constituencies would have been doubtful. So now we say, 
that the right measures of England are the men it bred ; 
that it has yielded more able men in five hundred years 
than any other nation ; and, though we must not play 
Providence, and balance the chances of producing ten 
great men against the comfort of ten thousand mean men, 
yet retrospectively we may strike the balance, and prefer 
one Alfred, one Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney, one 
Baleigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish democrats. 

The American system is more democratic, more hu- 
mane ; yet the American people do not yield better or 
more able men, or more inventions or books or benefits. 



23^ ENGLISH TRAITS. 

tlian the English. Congress is not wiser or better than 
Parliament. France has abolislied its suffocating old 
regime, but is not recently marked by any more wisdom 
or virtue. 

The power of performance has not been exceeded, — the 
creation of value. The English have given importance 
to individuals, a principal end and fruit of every society. 
Every man is allowed and encouraged to be what he is, 
and is guarded in the indulgence of his whim. " Magna 
Ciiarta," said Rushworth, " is such a fellow that he will 
have no sovereign." By this general activity, and by 
this sacredness of individuals, they have in seven hun- 
dred years evolved the principles of freedom. It is the 
land of patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the 
ocean out of which it emerged should wash it away, it 
will be remembered as an island famous for immortal 
laws, for the announcements of original right wliich 
make the stone tables of liberty. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 

A FEW days after my arrival at Manchester, in No- 
vember, 1847, the Manchester Athenaeum gave its annual 
Banquet in the Free-Trade Hall. With other guests, I 
was invited to be present, and to address the company. 
In looking over recently a newspaper report of my 
remarks, I incline to reprint it, as fitly expressing the 
feeling with which I entered England, and which agrees 



SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 233 

well enough with the more deliberate results of better 
acquaintance recorded in the foregoing pages. Sir Arch- 
ibald AHson, the historian, presided, and opened the 
meeting with a speech. He was followed by Mr. 
Cobden, Lord Bracklej, and others, among whom was 
Mr. Cruikshank, one of the contributors to " Punch." 
Mr. Dickens's letter of apology for his absence was 
read. Mr. Jerrold, who had been announced, did not 
appear. On being introduced to the meeting I said : — 

Mr. Ciiairman and Gentlemen : It is pleasant to me 
to meet this great and brilliant company, and doubly 
pleasant to see the faces of so many distinguished persons 
on this platform. But I have known all these persons 
already. When I was at home, they were as near to me 
as they are to you. The arguments of the League and 
its leader are known to all the friends of free trade. 
The gayeties and genius, the political, the social, the 
parietal wit of " Punch " go duly every fortnight to 
every boy and girl in Boston and New York. Sir, when 
I came to sea, I found the " History of Europe " * on 
the ship's cabin table, the property of the captain ; — a 
sort of programme or play-bill to tell the seafaring New- 
Englander what he shall liud on his lauding here. And 
as for Dombey, sir, there is no land where paper exists to 
print on, where it is not found ; no man who can read, 
tbat does not read it, and, if he cannot, he fmds some 
charitable pair of eyes that can, and hears it. 

But these things are not for me to say; these compli- 
ments, though true, would better come from one who 

* Bv Sir A. Alison. 



234 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

felt and understood these merits more. I am not here 
to exchange civilities with you, but rather to speak of 
that which I am sure interests these gentlemen more 
than their own praises ; of that which is good in holidays 
and working-days, the same in one century and in another 
century. That which lures a solitary American in the 
woods with tlie wish to see England, is the moral pecul- 
iarity of the Saxon race, — its connnanding sense of 
right and wrong, — the love and devotion to that, — this 
is the imperial trait, which arms them with the sceptre 
of the globe. It is this which lies at the foundation of 
that aristocratic character, which certainly wanders into 
strange vagaries, so that its origin is often lost sight of, 
but which, if it should lose this, would find itself para- 
lyzed ; and in trade, and in the mechanic's shop, gives 
that honesty in performance, that thoroughness and solid- 
ity of work, which is a national characteristic. This 
conscience is one element, and the other is that loyal 
adhesion, that habit of friendship, that homage of man 
to man, running through all classes, — the electing of 
worthy persons to a certain fraternity, to acts of kind- 
ness and warm and stanch support, from year to year, 
from youth to age, — which is alike lovely and honorable 
to those who render and those who receive it ; — which 
stands in strong contrast with the superficial attachments 
of other races, their excessive courtesy, and short-lived 
connection. 

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holi- 
day though it be, I have not the smallest interest in any 
holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended 
joys ; and I think it just, in this time of gloom and com- 



SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 235 

merclal disaster, of affliction and beggary in these dis- 
tricts, tliat on these very accounts I speak of, you should 
not fail to keep your literary anniversary. I seem to 
hear you say, that, for all that is come and gone yet, we 
will not reduce by one chaplet or one oak-leaf the bra- 
veries of our annual feast. Eor I must tell you, I was 
given to understand in my childhood, that the British 
island from which my forefathers came, was no lotus- 
garden, no paradise of serene sky and roses and music 
and merriment all the year round, no, but a cold, foggy, 
mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open 
air, but robust men and virtuous women, and these of a 
wonderful fibre and endurance; that their best parts were 
slowly revealed; their virtues did not come out until 
they quarrelled : they did not strike twelve the first time; 
good lovers, good haters, and you could know little about 
tliem till you had seen them long, and little good of them 
till you had seen them in action ; that in prosperity they 
were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they were 
grand. Is it not true, sir, that the wise ancients did not 
praise the ship parting with flying colors from the port, 
but only that brave sailer which came back with torn 
sheets and battered sides, stript of her banners, but 
having ridden out the storm ? And so, gentlemen, I feel 
in regard to this aged England, with the possessions, 
honors, and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a 
thousand years gathering around her, irretrievably com- 
mitted as she now is to many old customs which cannot 
be suddenly changed ; pressed upon by the transitions of 
trade, and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, 
machines, and competing populations, — I see her not 



236 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has 
seen dark days before ; indeed, w^ith a kind of instinct 
that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that 
in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor 
and a pulse like a cannon. I see her in her old age, 
not decrepit, but young, and still daring to believe in 
her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I 
say. All hail ! mother of nations, mother of heroes, with 
strength still equal to the time ; still wise to entertain 
and swift to execute the policy which the mind and heart 
of mankind require in the present hour, and thus only 
hospitable to the foreigner, and truly a home to the 
thoughtful and generous who are born m the soil. So 
be it! so let it be ! If it be not so, if the courage of 
England goes with the chances of a commercial crisis, 
I will go back to the capes of Massachusetts, and my 
own Indian stream, and say to my countrymen, tlie old 
race are all gone, and the elasticity and hope of man- 
kind must henceforth remain on the Alleghany ranges, 
or nowhere. 



THE END 



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